This paper investigates how information affect voting behaviour. There exist a large literature suggesting that uninformed voters can use informational shortcuts or cues to vote as if they were informed. This paper tests this hypothesis using unique Swedish individual survey data on the...

We present evidence that more ethnically fragmented communities spend, all else equal, more on police services than less fragmented communities. We introduce a model of spending on police services which we use to interpret the data. In this model, we assume that the decision to commit a crime is...

This paper provides evidence of efficient taxation of groups with heterogeneous levels of "tax morale". We set up an optimal income tax model where high tax morale implies a high subjective cost of evading taxes. The model predicts that "nice guys finish last": groups with higher tax morale will...

Natural disasters have been a major cause of human suffering. Countries with higher income, lower inequality, lower corruption, and more democratic regimes have been found to experience less casualties from disasters. Government repression, however, could also play a role in disaster...

This paper investigates the causal link between voter turnout and policy outcomes related to the size of government. Tax rate and public expenditures are the focal policy outcomes in this study. To capture the causal mechanism, Swedish and Finnish municipal data are used and a constitutional...

Can digital information and communication technology (ICT) foster mass political mobilization? We use a novel geo-referenced dataset for the entire African continent between 1998 and 2012 on the coverage of mobile phone signal together with geo-referenced data from multiple sources on the...

Do established parties change political institutions to disadvantage smaller, nonmainstream parties if the latters ́electoral prospects improve? We study this question with a natural experiment from the German federal state of Hesse. The experiment is the abolishment of an explicit electoral...

Do established parties change political institutions to disadvantage smaller, non-mainstream parties if the latters' electoral prospects improve? We study this question with a natural experiment from the German federal State of Hesse. The experiment is the abolishment of an explicit electoral...

Politicians seeking reelection need voters to know what they have done for them. Thus, incentives may arise to spend more money where media coverage is higher. We present a simple model to explain the allocation of public spending across jurisdictions contingent on media activity. An incumbent...

Numerous studies have found a negative relationship between the closeness of an election, the size of the electorate and voter turnout. It is often claimed that this relationship supports the rational voter hypothesis, with closeness and size proxying for the decisiveness of a vote. We offer a...