I investigate the causal effect of access to relevant local television on i) U.S. citizens' knowledge of their senators' actions in the Senate and ii) whether citizens hold their senators accountable for these actions. To do so, I utilize the mismatch between the local television markets and the...

This paper shows how provision of public goods differ in the context of centralisation and decentralisation when the incumbent politician confers the responsibility of the actual provision to a bureaucrat who extracts bribe from the public and provides a predetermined portion of it to the...

Scholars have long deplored voters' lack of interest in politics and argue greater political engagement would improve the performance of democracy. We consider a model of elections where successful communication of political messages during campaigns requires efforts by politicians and a...

How important are political parties in motivating and disciplining elected officials? Using a difference-in-discontinuity design, we study how shocks to incumbents’ re-election probabilities affect legislative behavior in a setting where parties fully control candidate selection. We find that...

This dissertation consists of six self-contained chapters that are related to the behavior of firms and politicians in a broader sense. After an introduction to the topic, the first part of the dissertation elaborates on how institutional and political framework conditions influence the behavior...

We examine whether parties punish politicians who vote against the party line in roll-call votes. Using data of German members of parliament over the legislative period 2009-2013, we take into account that the effect of punishment differs along the list of candidates because a candidate is...

We examine whether conservative politicians are less likely to support same-sex marriage when they run for office in safe districts using new data based on a roll-call vote in the national German parliament. The results show that the margin of the majority for the incumbent in the previous...

We examine whether voters rewarded conservative politicians who were voting in favor of same-sex marriage. Data is based on a roll-call vote in the German national parliament (Bundestag) in June 2017. This roll-call vote drastically influenced the public discourse about the social political...

We examine whether voters rewarded conservative politicians who were voting in favor of same-sex marriage. Data is based on a roll-call vote in the German national parliament (Bundestag) in June 2017. This roll-call vote drastically influenced the public discourse about the social political...