We study a large-scale intervention designed by civil society organizations to reduce vote buying in Uganda's 2016 elections. We study this intervention in light of a model where incumbents benefit from a first-mover and valence advantage, vote buying and campaigning are complementary, and voter...

Previous studies of female suffrage have interpreted the change in voting patterns as reflecting a change in voter composition, in part because only aggregate voting data was available. We exploit the existence of separate counts for women and men votes in Chile before and after female suffrage....

This paper analyses financial inclusion in Africa focusing on the role of political business cycles and pricing behaviour of banks. We employ a sample of 330 banks operating in 29 African countries to test for two related hypotheses. Panel fixed and random effects were estimated for the period...

Herein, we prove a Condorcet jury theorem (CJT) for large elections with multiple alternatives. Voters have common interests that depend on an unknown state of nature. Each voter receives an imprecise private signal about the state of nature and then submits one vote (simple plurality rule). We...

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,...