The causes of people's political attitudes are largely unknown. We study this issue by exploiting longitudinal data on lottery winners. Comparing people before and after a lottery windfall, we show that winners tend to switch towards support for a right-wing political party and to become less...

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...

The extension of the franchise to social groups with less property and income is associated with greater income redistribution from the rich to the poor and extension in the provision of public goods, which leads to the growth of government expenditure. All of these expected changes are costly...