Political competition, party strategy and communication in the era of social media are growing issues. Due to the increasing social media presence of parties and voters alike, direct communication is more important for party competition. This paper aims to improve the methodological approach...

We empirically examine the relationship between shares of foreigners in a district and the share of votes cast in that district for the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), the major anti-immigrant party in the 2017 German parliamentary election. The classic theory on the political economy of...

Through social media, politicians can personalize their campaigns and target specific groups of voters with an unprecedented precision. We assess the effects of such political micro-targeting by exploiting daily advertising prices on Facebook during the 2016 US presidential campaign. We measure...

Perceptions of social mobility in society are one of the most important determinants of individuals' preferences for redistribution and tolerance for economic inequalities. What shapes these perceptions is however so far little understood. In this paper, I propose and empirically test a...

Elections constitute the essential element of democracy, yet surprisingly little is known about their immediate consequences for individual well-being. Cross-country empirical evidence is particularly absent for the campaign period leading up to elections. While elections as a process allow...

Public policies that intervene or restrict consumer choices for the benefit of the society are often controversial. For instance, the compliance rate of COVID-19 pandemic social distancing rules varied dramatically across cities and states, and these policies even backfired among some consumers...

Direct experience of a peer's punishment might make non-punished peers reassess the probability and consequences of facing punishment and hence induce a change in their behavior. We test this mechanism in a setting, China, in which we observe the reactions to the same peer's punishment by listed...

We study a parametric politico-economic model of economic growth with productive public goods and public consumption goods. The provision of public goods is funded by a proportional tax on consumers' income. Agents are heterogeneous in their initial capital endowments, discount factors and the...

This paper analyzes the political economy of public education and redistribution in an overlapping-generation model of a two-class society in which growth is driven by the accumulation of human capital. The levels of public education and lump- sum financial transfers are determined by voting,...

This paper analyzes the political economy of public education and lump-sum transfer in an overlapping-generation model of a two-class society in which the dy- namics of inequality is driven by the accumulation of human capital. The two redistributive policies are determined by voting, while...