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...

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 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 be...

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...

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...

Considerable concern has been expressed in recent years about declines in voter participation rates in the United States and in several other major democratic countries. Some feel low participation rates introduce a class bias into the political process and thereby worsen the outcomes from it....

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 georeferenced data from multiple sources on the...

This paper considers the evidence of near-rationality, as described by Akerlof, Dickens, and Perry (2000). Using detailed surveys of household inflation expectations for the United States and Sweden, we find that the data are generally unsupportive of the near-rationality hypothesis. However, we...

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...

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...