How does competition affect the entry and selection of politicians? I use data on U.S. Congressional primary and …

-ideological voters, who care about national and local policies, strongly prefer experts. We show that parties compete on good politicians … prediction. We find that politicians with higher ex-ante quality - as measured by years of schooling, previous market income, and …, the characteristics of politicians belonging to opposite parties converge to high-quality levels in close races …

politicians' quality is positively affected by their wage and apply a Fuzzy Regression Discontinuity Design relying on the fact … that in Italy the wage of the mayor increases non-monotonically at different thresholds. Results show that an exogenous …