Many European countries impose employment bans that prevent asylum seekers from entering the local labor market for a certain waiting period upon arrival. We provide evidence on the long-term effects of these employment bans on the subsequent economic integration of refugees. We leverage a...

Instrumental-variable (IV) estimation is an essential method for applied researchers across the social and behavioral sciences who analyze randomized control trials marred by non-compliance or leverage partially exogenous treatment variation in observational studies. The potential outcomes...

We present a formal model of electoral competition where parties' platforms are endogenously chosen and depend on the degree of the electoral rule disproportionality. We first show that proportional electoral systems generate centrifugal forces that increase candidate differentiation. This in...

The Brexit vote took place three days before the June 26, 2016, Spain's parliamentary elections, in which anti-systemic parties performed worse compared to the previous elections (December 2015) despite the optimistic predictions of the pre-election polls and the surge in the support for...

We study parties' optimal ideological cohesion across electoral rules, when the following trade-off is present: A more heterogenous set of candidates is electorally appealing (catch-all party), yet, it serves policy-related goals less efficiently. When the rule becomes more disproportional, thus...

In the period after the break of the Great Recession a series of drastic changes in the political systems of many affected countries occurred: the predominant role of systemic parties in forming political outcomes was challenged and many previously non-systemic voices gained significant...