We estimate the causal effect of the electoral system on corruption by leveraging a specificity of the French electoral law where the electoral system for municipal councils depends on municipal population. Specifically, municipalities with fewer than 1,000 inhabitants use an individual majority...

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...

Promises are prevalent in many competitive environments, but promise keeping is often difficult to observe. Do promises still offer an opportunity to honor future obligations, if promise keeping is unobservable? Focusing on campaign promises, we study the value of transparency. We showhow...

This paper studies the existence of election cycles in public procurement in the European Union for the national level. We analyze different steps along the procurement process, namely the publication of the contract notice, the awarding of the contract, and the project completion. We point out...

We present novel evidence on the value of cross-border political access. We analyze data on meetings of US multinational enterprises (MNEs) with European Commission (EC) policymakers. Meetings with Commissioners are associated with positive abnormal equity returns. We study channels of value...

Call a mechanism that associates each profile of preferences over candidates to an ambiguous act an Ambiguous Social Function (ASCF). This paper studies the strategy-proofness of ASCFs. We find that an ASCF is unanimous and strategyproof if and only if there exists a nonempty subset of voters,...

How did the large asylum-seeker inflow to Germany in 2015 affect concerns about immigration? Using individual-level panel data for the years 2012–2018, I show that after 2015 concerns about immigration increased by about 21 pp. and support for extreme right-wing parties by about 1.7 pp. These...

Using new data from a three-wave panel survey administered in Germany between May 2020 and May 2021, this paper studies the impact of a negative shock affecting every strata of the population, such as the development of COVID-19, on preferences for redistribution. Exploiting the plausibly...

Florian Dorn erstellte diesen Beitrag während seines Promotionsstudiums an der Universität München (LMU). Die Studie wurde im September 2020 abgeschlossen und von der Fakultät für Volkswirtschaftslehre als Dissertation angenommen. Die Dissertation trägt zur Empirie der Ökonomie des...

We investigate the relationship between political attitudes and prosociality in a survey of a representative sample of the U.S. population during the first summer of the COVID-19 pandemic. We find that an experimental measure of prosociality correlates positively with adherence to protective...