We investigate the reaction of Italian Members of Parliament to a rigorous fact-checking of their public statements. Our research design relies on a novel randomized field experiment in collaboration with the leading Italian fact-checking company. Our results show that politicians are responsive...

To study how different economic information affect people's perceptions and attitudes towards carbon prices, we conduct an online survey experiment in a representative sample of the German voting population. We find that providing information about the efficiency of carbon prices as well as on...

In democracies, political parties promise to expand social benefits to attract voters in the lead-up to elections. However, we know relatively little whether such campaign promises effectively sway benefiting voters. Using a regression-discontinuity design, we estimate the causal effects of an...

We propose that false beliefs about own current economic status are an important factor for explaining populist attitudes. Eliciting subjects' receptiveness to rightwing populism and their perceived relative income positions in a representative survey of German households, we find that people...

We conduct a survey experiment among 18,000 respondents in Germany to examine the determinants of support for rent control policies. Highlighting undesirable price and supply effects lowers respondents' agreement with rent control, while pointing out that it can prevent displacement of...

We find that policy decisions made by elected politicians in Portuguese municipalities violate the predictions of standard microeconomic theory. Municipalities can choose a withholding rate between zero and five percent of the income tax revenue collected within their boundaries by the national...

Nowadays, immigration is a polarizing topic in politics. In this paper, we investigate how much this political polarization is driven by the depiction narratives made of immigrants vis-a-vis the natives. Furthermore, we look at whether polarization is rooted in private preferences over...

Promise competition is prevalent in many economic environments, but promise keeping is often difficult to observe. We study the value of transparency for promise competition and ask whether promises still offer an opportunity to honor future obligations when outcomes do not allow for observing...

We propose that false beliefs about the own current economic status are an important factor for explaining populist attitudes. Along with the subjects' receptiveness to right-wing populism, we elicit their perceived relative income positions in a representative survey of German households. We...

I analyze Dutch panel data that contains rich information on voting, political opinions, and personality traits. I show that "adversarial" preferences - competitiveness, negative reciprocity, distrust, and selfishness - are strong predictors of right-wing and populist political preferences....