Divided government is often thought of as causing legislative deadlock. I investigate the link between divided government and economic reforms using a novel data set on welfare reforms in US states between 1978 and 2010. Panel data regressions show that under divided government a US state is...

We investigate whether the decision to experiment with novel policies is influenced by electoral incentives. Our empirical setting is the U.S. welfare reform in 1996, which marked the most dramatic shift in social policy since the New Deal. We find that electoral incentives matter: governors...

Fiscal rules are a promising policy tool to address fiscal indiscipline, but their effectiveness and political feasibility remain unclear, particularly in weakly institutionalized settings. To answer this question, we leverage exogenous variation across Colombian municipalities in exposure to a...

I test whether more educated candidates make into less corrupt public managers. Leveraging on a randomized inspection program and close-race elections, I show that college-degree candidates commit 8-11% less infringements than their less educated peers, which is driven by a lower level of...

Proportional election systems are widespread across countries and often lead to coalition governments. This creates interest in how the form of government (single-party or coalition governments) causally influences fiscal policies. It is difficult to estimate this causal effect empirically...

Using a panel of United States counties, this study compares outcomes before and during the 2020-2021 school year between locations that started K-12 instruction on campus, remotely, or through a hybrid approach. Corroborating recent studies, we find comparatively larger increases of COVID-19...

In response to high-profile cases of police misconduct, reformers are calling for greater use of civilian allegations in identifying potential problem officers. This paper applies an Empirical Bayes framework to data on civilian allegations and civil rights litigation in Chicago to assess the...

COVID-19 has brought to the fore the issue of state preparedness in mitigating health emergencies. This paper problematizes the received wisdom of greater state capacity in mitigating the severity of the pandemic. Based on a case study of West Bengal, a subnational state of India, it shows that...

Over 300 government members have had the main responsibility for international development cooperation in 23 member countries of the OECD’s Development Assistance Committee since the organization started reporting detailed Official Development Assistance (ODA) data in 1967. Understanding their...