We investigate what happens when the politician-developer nexus is disrupted by an election. We find that if the incumbent party loses, real-estate project completion times increase by 5%. We investigate two mechanisms for the slowdown, delayed permits and increased litigation. We find that...

Politicians are not neutral maximizers of the public good, they respond to incentives just like other individuals. We apply the same reasoning to those politicians in robes called judges. We argue that elected judges, particularly partisan elected judges, have an incentive to redistribute wealth...

We investigate what happens when the politician-developer nexus is disrupted by an election. We find that if the incumbent party loses, real-estate project completion times increase by 5%. We investigate two mechanisms for the slowdown, delayed permits and increased litigation. We find that...

Mutually beneficial arrangements between politicians and real estate developers are common in many developing countries. We document what happens when the politician-developer nexus is disrupted by an election. We construct a novel dataset of real estate projects and electoral constituencies in...