Recent decades have seen major changes to the local media environment in the United States, with the absorption of many formerly independent local TV stations into conglomerates. Using a comprehensive dataset of acquisitions, we examine the effects of ownership by the three largest television...

Weekly lotteries determine which politicians ask the UK Prime Minister a question in front of a male-dominated, packed, and noisy chamber. Women are 12% less likely to submit questions than same-cohort men, and this gap does not close with lottery-induced experience asking a question, or with...

Political discourse has often stoked racial and ethnic divisions, raising the possibility that individuals' self-reported racial and ethnic identities may change in response to an increasingly hostile environment. We shed light on this question by measuring the impacts of local support for...

The FDA is responsible for the approval of new drugs, biological products and medical devices in the United States. As part of the approval process, the FDA relies on advisory committees, which provide independent advice from outside experts. We combine a structural approach with newly collected...

Support for right-wing populist parties is characterised by considerable regional heterogeneity and especially concentrated in regions that have experienced economic decline. It remains unclear, however, whether the spatial externalities of local decline, including homelessness and crime, boost...

This paper develops a model of news discernment to explore the influence of elections on the formation of partisan-driven parallel information universes. Using survey data from news quizzes administered during and outside the 2020 U.S. presidential election, the model shows that partisan...

The rich tend to support policies favoring the affluent and are over-represented among both voters and legislators. This paper investigates whether these correlations reflect causal effects of wealth by leveraging random, positive wealth shocks in the form of lottery prizes. Compared to suitably...

We conduct parallel surveys of legislators and citizens in three countries to study their tolerance for corruption. In Italy, Colombia, and Pakistan legislators and citizens respond similarly to hypothetical scenarios involving trade-offs between, for example, probity and efficiency: both...

This article examines the effect of leader longevity in power on world happiness. To make the assessment, a sample composed of 135 countries observed over the period 2006 to 2018 was constituted. The results obtained from OLS estimates show that longevity in power reduces individual happiness....