The persistence literature in economics and related disciplines connects recent outcomes to events long ago. This influential literature marks a promising development but has drawn criticism. We discuss two prominent examples that ground the rise of the Nazi Party in distant historical roots....

We test the predictions of a behavioral model of transactional electoral politics in the context of a randomized anti-vote-selling intervention in the Philippines. We model selling one's vote as a temptation good: it creates positive utility for the future self at the moment of voting, but not...

Do voters use ballot paper information on the personal characteristics of political candidates as cues in low-information elections? Using a unique dataset containing 4423 political candidates from recent elections in Germany, we show that candidates' occupations do play an important role in...

In this paper, we examine how the institutional design affects the outcome of bank bailout decisions. In the German savings bank sector, distress events can be resolved by local politicians or a state-level association. We show that decisions by local politicians with close links to the bank are...

Results from a new experiment shed light on the effects of voter information on vote buying and incumbent advantage. The treatment provided voters with information about a major spending program and the proposed allocations and promises of mayoral candidates just prior to municipal elections. It...

In this paper, we examine how the institutional design affects the outcome of bank bailout decisions. In the German savings bank sector, distress events can be resolved by local politicians or a state-level association. We show that decisions by local politicians with close links to the bank are...

The modern Condorcet jury theorem states that under weak conditions, when voters have common interests, elections will aggregate information when the population is large, in any equilibrium. Here, we study the performance of large elections with population uncertainty. We find that the modern...

This paper studies the effect of female political representation on violence against women. Using a Regression Discontinuity design for close mayoral elections between female and male candidates in Brazil, we find that electing female mayors leads to a reduction in episodes of gender violence....

A common narrative is that COVID-19 cost Trump re-election. We do not find supporting evidence; if anything, the pandemic helped Trump. However, we find substantial evidence that voters abandoned Trump in counties with large increases in health insurance coverage since the Affordable Care Act,...

This paper studies a very pure form of "vote purchasing". We consider whether it may be in the interest of a party to discriminate between groups that, possibly except for size, are identical in all welfare relevant spects, i.e. the groups are assumed to have the same income, needs, etc. To...