Fiscal rules, i.e., constraints to the policymaking discretion of elected officials in terms of deficit and expenditures, are widely used tools to regulate fiscal policies. This paper shows that they can negatively affect the quality of candidates willing to run for office. We build a simple...

Do electoral incentives affect immigration policies? I study this question in the setting of Italian municipalities making decisions about the reception of refugees. The localized control of the reception policy (SPRAR), combined with the exogenous timing of policy decisions and staggered...

Should voters always pay attention to politics? I explore the role of endogenous costly attention allocation in politics, combining insights from the growing literature on rational inattention with a standard model of political agency. I show that when attention to the action of the politician...

We study the implications of state dependent costs of policy mismatch in political agency models where politicians have reputational concerns over their preferences and the "good'' politician shares the same objectives of the voters. We find that state-dependent costs can make pandering...

Is competition in the mass media market an effective deterrent against media capture? Does it prevent political groups from influencing reporting? This paper shows that in some cases it does not. Building on the literature on media capture, the model highlights that, under fairly generic...

We investigate differences in the economic performance of secular and religious local rulers in Medieval England. Exploiting the Norman conquest of England as a historical experiment, we compare economic outcomes of estates controlled by secular feudal landlords, Benedictine monasteries and...