Using data on essentially every U.S. Supreme Court decision since 1946, we estimate a model of peer effects on the Court. We estimate the impact of justice ideology and justice votes on the votes of their peers. To identify the peer effects, we use two instruments that generate plausibly...

Social interaction combined with social conformity spreads attitudes and behaviors through a society. This paper examines such a process geographically for compliance with the norm that good citizens should vote. The diffusion of conformist behavior affects the local degree of conformity with...

I propose a nonparametric iid bootstrap that achieves asymptotic refinements for t tests and confidence intervals based on the generalized method of moments (GMM) estimators even when the model is misspecified. In addition, my bootstrap does not require recentering the bootstrap moment function,...

This paper reviews the relationship between international investment agreements (IIAs) and foreign direct investment (FDI). It is organised in two parts. The first part explores the generic structure of IIAs and highlights the components that are particularly relevant to FDI. It then gives an...

An important concern about the surge in the number of refugees arriving in Europe is increased support for far-right, nationalist, anti-immigration parties. This paper studies a natural experiment in an Austrian federal state to identify the causal effect of exposure to refugees in the...

Public preferences for charging tuition are important for determining higher education finance. To test whether public support for tuition depends on information and design, we devise several survey experiments in representative samples of the German electorate (N19,500). The electorate is...

Public preferences for charging tuition are important for determining higher education finance. To test whether public support for tuition depends on information and design, we devise several survey experiments in representative samples of the German electorate (N19,500). The electorate is...

In this paper, we test the hypothesis that the causal effect of immigrant presence on anti-immigrant votes is a short-run effect. For this purpose, we consider a distributed lag model and adapt the standard instrumental variable approach proposed by Altonji and Card (1991) to a dynamic...