Rain affects electoral turnout both through a direct effect on the cost of voting and by changing the opportunity cost. In a panel of Norwegian municipalities I find that rain on Election Day increases turnout. As turnout affects electoral outcomes, rain provides an exogeneous source of...

Rainfall is a truly exogeneous variable and hence popular as an instrument for many outcomes. But by its very nature, rainfall in nearby areas tends to be correlated. I show theoretically that if there are also spatial trends in outcomes of interest, this may create spurious correlation. In...

The standard approach to inequality measurement regards all inequalities as being unfair. However, most people do not share this view, and believe that some inequalities are fair. This paper shows one way of generalizing the standard approach to take account of the distinction between fair and...

We show that the recent rise in Afghan opium production is caused by violent conflicts. Violence destroys roads and irrigation, crucial to alternative crops, and weakens local incentives to rebuild infrastructure and enforce law and order. Exploiting a unique data set, we show that Western...

In many countries extreme poverty is unnecessary. Yet it persists. We propose a simple index, denoted the Miser index, to measure the extent to which societies have poverty in the midst of affluence. It builds on the generalized Lorenz curve, but can also be seen as a measure of polarization...

No voters cast their votes based on perfect information, but better educated and richer voters are on average better informed than others. We develop a model where the voting mistakes resulting from low political knowledge reduce the weight of poor voters, and cause parties to choose political...

This paper studies the joint effect of fractionalization and inequality on the size of government. Within a political economy model of tax determination, I study the effect of voters with a group-based social conscience, so they care more about the well-being of those belonging to their own...

<title>A<sc>bstract</sc> </title> We measure the level of poverty in the midst of affluence using what we denote the miser index. We calculate the index of poverty-induced polarisation for a number of countries. The most miserly countries are in Southern Africa and Latin America. Miserly countries tend to be socially...

Rain affects electoral turnout both through a direct effect on the cost of voting and by changing the opportunity cost. In a panel of Norwegian municipalities I find that rain on Election Day increases turnout. As turnout affects electoral outcomes, rain provides an exogeneous source of...

The time-series nature of repeated surveys is seldom taken into account. The few studies that do so smooth the period-wise estimates without using the cross-sectional information. This leads to inefficient estimation. We present a statistical model of repeated surveys and construct a...