Do governments increase public employment in election years? This article answers this question by using data from Sweden and Finland, two countries that are similar in many respects but in which local elections are held at different points in time. These facts make it possible for us to...

We study the returns to political office using data from Finnish parliamentary elections in 1970-2007 and municipal elections in 1996-2008. The discontinuity of electoral outcomes in individual candidate votes allows us to estimate the causal effect of being elected on subsequent income. Getting...

We estimate the effect of getting elected on future income development of political candidates. We present a bootstrap approach for measuring electoral closeness, which can be used to implement a regression discontinuity design in any electoral system. We apply the method to the Finnish...