Policy interventions are generally evaluated for their direct effectiveness. Little is known about their ability to persist over time and spill across contexts. These latter aspects can reinforce or offset the direct impacts depending on the policy instrument choice. Through an online experiment...

This study relies on a constitutional reform introducing term limits at the local elections level in Portugal as a natural experiment to estimate incumbency advantage in mayoral elections. It stresses the distinction between partisan and personal incumbency advantage using data on six local...

Politicians, especially executives, regularly seek to project their influence into new policy domains. In some instances, they do so only after having secured the requisite statutory authority; in others, they intervene without prior authorization, hoping that their actions henceforth serve as...

We study the political consequences of lifting restrictions on the funding of groups engaging in outside spending (e.g., independent political advertising) in elections. Theoretically, we assume that outside spending changes the salience of candidate-specific attributes relative to their party...

We consider mechanism design in contexts in which agents exhibit bounded depth of reasoning (level k) instead of rational expectations. We use simple direct mechanisms, in which agents report only first-order beliefs. While level 0 agents are assumed to be truth tellers, level k agents...

Despite the perceived importance of accounting standard setters, it remains unknown whether and how much individual FASB board members can influence specific accounting policies because it is difficult to measure any board member's impact during the process of accounting standard setting absent...

America's most recent recession has taken a toll on public agency budgets, including criminal justice agencies. More than half of U.S. states have had their corrections budgets reduced in recent years. Fortunately, crime has remained fairly stable during this same time frame, despite fears that...

Although social capital has been considered of the utmost importance for development and poverty alleviation by governments and NGOs, it remains a complex and elusive concept. Different dimensions of social capital form part of the puzzle: cooperation is an individual other-regarding preference;...

Do established parties change political institutions to disadvantage smaller, non-mainstream 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...

This experimental study investigates the behavior of banks in a large value payment system. More specifically, we look at 1) the reactions of banks to disruptions in the payment system and 2) the way banks behavior changes to incentives of the central bank. The game used in this experiment is a...