We study competition between political parties in repeated elections with probabilistic voting, allowing a multidimensional policy space and multiple political parties. This model entails multiple equilibria. When parties hold different opinions on some policy, they may take different policy...

University students have been particularly affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. We present results from the first wave of the Global COVID-19 Student Survey, which was administered at 28 universities in the United States, Spain, Australia, Sweden, Austria, Italy, and Mexico between April and...

A prominent hypothesis suggests that violent uprisings against the ruling elites have played an important role in shaping the distribution of power and prosperity. This paper employs newly-collected historical data from Finland to evaluate this hypothesis. We document that the country had...

Does politician quality matter for policy in representative governments? I use administrative registry data on local politicians in Finland and exploit exogenous variation generated by close electoral races that shift the quality composition of local councils to show that (i) electing more...

Do electorally concerned politicians have an incentive to contain epidemics when public-health interventions may have an economic cost? We revisit the first pandemic of the 21st century: the 2009 H1N1 outbreak in Mexico. Leveraging detailed administrative data and a difference-in-differences...

The eastern enlargement of the EU differentially exposed workers in different regions and occupations in Finland to foreign workforce, in particular to posted workers. Using a triple-differences strategy and detailed individual-level administrative data, we document robust evidence that the...

Do electoral successes of women pave the path for more female representation? We study whether gender parity can be self-sustaining and self-reinforcing in Finland, a pioneer of gender equality. To do so, we construct a database of local elections between 1996 and 2021 and leverage election...

This paper presents evidence of political legacies of exposure to a violent class conflict over 100 years. We revisit the Finnish Civil War of 1918 and first trace out the impact of local conflict exposure on electoral outcomes over a quarter-century period between the World Wars. The electoral...