Intro -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- 1 The Energy Challenge -- 2 Energy Choices -- 3 What People Want -- 4 Price and Consequence -- 5 Why Do People Hate Coal and Love Solar? -- 6 The Chicken and the Egg -- 7 Two Minds about Climate Change -- 8 What to Do? -- 9 A Way Forward -- Appendix --...

This paper uses event study methodology to measure whether firms that gave soft money to political parties received excessively high rates of returns from their contributions. We measure the excess returns of firms that gave large amounts of soft money and firms that gave no soft money, and...

This paper examines evidence of statistical bias in newspaper reporting on campaign finance. We compile data on all dollar amounts for campaign expenditures, contributions, and receipts reported in the five largest circulation newspapers in the United States from 1996 to 2000. We then compare...

This paper examines the effects of party control of state governments on the distribution of intergovernmental transfers across counties from 1957 to 1997. We find that the governing parties skew the distribution of funds in favor of areas that provide them with the strongest electoral support....

We examine the relationship between parliamentary seats and cabinet posts in European governments between 1946 and 2001. Our specification improves on past studies in two respects. First, it derives and uses the voting weights of the underlying coalition formation games. This reduces the...

In this paper, we present data from a three-mode survey comparison study carried out in 2010. National surveys were fielded at the same time over the Internet (using an opt-in Internet panel), by telephone with live interviews (using a national RDD sample of landlines and cell phones), and by...

We develop an incomplete-information theory of economic voting, where voters' perceptions of macro-economic performance are affected by economic conditions of people similar to themselves. Our theory alleviates two persistent issues in the literature: it shows how egotropic motivations can lead...

Public opinion about energy can be understood in a unified framework. First, people evaluate key attributes of energy sources, particularly a fuel’s cost and environmental harms. Americans, for example, view coal as relatively inexpensive but harmful, natural gas as less harmful but more...