This paper probes the persuasive power of authoritarian propaganda on social media and compares it to a similar campaign by the opposition. We carried out a field experiment during the 2018 presidential elections in Russia by collecting voting intentions and then randomly advertising a pro- and...

As competition in the economic market yields consumer benefits, political competition is supposed to be welfare-enhancing for citizens in terms of providing information, increasing political choice, promoting competence and good behaviour. Even so, recent literature concerning the benefits of...

This paper provides, after a contextualizing introduction, the first-time translation of Walter Eucken’s presentation during the first session of the founding meeting of the Mont Pèlerin Society, April 1-10, 1947. Eucken was the only scholar based in Germany to attend the conference and took...

This article analyses the dynamics of electoral promises, building on an electoral competition model with endogenous policies. It extends the Grossman-Helpman (1994) model [Grossman G., Helpman E. [1994], "Protection for sale", American Economic Review, 84, 4, 833-850] to include sanctions from...

Using a unique setting in China, where the geographic distance between Collective firms and local governments is highly persistent due to legal restrictions on land ownership and mobility, we investigate the role of government involvement in small firms. In the analysis of survey responses, we...

I show that lobbying generates negative externalities, which affect non-lobbying companies. When a piece of new legislation passes in Congress, non-lobbying companies in aggregate lose $1.9bn in market value. I obtain this result using a novel dataset combining comprehensive information on...

In this paper, I study how anti-corruption shocks affect Chinese city leaders through political factions or social networks, or more specifically, how sharing college or workplace connections with government officials who have been investigated for corruption affects the city leaders' economic...

We study how political factors can shape competition in the mobile telecommunication sector. We show that the way a government designs the rules of the game has an impact on concentration, competition, and prices. Pro-competition rules reduce prices, but do not hurt the quality of services or...

Using novel data on firms' government relations staff, and two distinct empirical settings, we show that political activism enables firms to grow their market power. The documented increases in profit margins and market share persist for up to two years, and are concentrated among large...

Incumbency advantage is a well known phenomenon in developed countries such as the US. Recent work on Brazil and India has suggested that incumbents are disadvantaged when seeking reelection in developing countries. Most of the research on developing countries has focused on estimating...