We study how two selection systems for public officials, appointment and election, affect policy outcomes, focusing on state court judges and their criminal sentencing decisions. First, under appointment, policy congruence with voter preferences is attained through selecting judges with...

This article presents a continuous-time Bayesian model for analyzing durations of behavior displays in social interactions. Duration data of social interactions are often complex because of repeated behaviors (events) at individual or group (e.g. dyad) level, multiple behaviors (multistates),...

This paper examines several hypotheses that have been proposed to explain the existence and growth of legislators' campaign "warchests". We examine the sources and political consequences of warchests in US House elections over the period of 1978-1998. Briefly, our findings are as follows. First,...

We investigate the influence of electoral rules and voter information in elections on voting outcomes and accountability of incumbent public officials, using new data on election of state court judges in 40 states in the U.S. from 1990 to 2010. We find, first, that voting is very partisan in...

We employ a regression discontinuity design (RDD) based on close elections to estimate the rents from a seat in the U.S. Congress between 1850 and 1880. Using census data, we compare wealth accumulation among those who won or lost their first race by a small margin. We find evidence of...