This paper studies how international trade influences U.S. presidential elections. We expect the positive employment effects of expanding exports to increase support for the incumbent's party, and job insecurity from import competition to diminish such support. Our national-level models show for...

Donald Trump's presidential campaign highlighted protectionism of U.S.-born workers at a time of growing income inequality, racial tensions, and labor market polarization. Our study investigates if and how voters' life circumstances affected election behavior between 2012 and 2016, and how voter...

US voters have been moving apart in the last twenty years. This paper analyzes how their voting participation has partitioned by looking at US counties in the 2012 Presidential elections. To tackle this question, we propose a methodology that jointly addresses spatial autocorrelation of the...

Much of the public discourse and media analysis of the surprise outcome of the 2016 US presidential election has emphasized the role of manufacturing workers. This paper examines the importance of manufacturing jobs and job loss as determinants of voting patterns using county-level voting data...

The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines insurgent as “one who acts contrary to the policies and decisions of one's own political party.” In this paper, an “insurgent presidential campaign” is defined as the campaign of a candidate who did not have the support of the United States of...

The open-economy politics of trade presumes that elections, as a political institution, aggregate preferences of individual voters to resolve a salient trade cleavage in a democratic society. This presumption, despite being widely applied to analytical narratives of trade politics in the...

International trade directly influences US presidential elections. We explore the electoral implications of the increasing tradability of services and the large US surplus in services trade. Our paper builds on prior work showing that job insecurity from import competition in manufacturing...

While political experts have long claimed that bad weather lowers voter turnout, the impact of weather on U.S. election outcomes remains unclear. The most rigorous work to date found that precipitation benefits Republicans and suggested that Florida rains influenced the outcome of the 2000...

This study examines the effects of political uncertainty around US presidential elections on firm risk, expected return, trading activity, and dispersion of investor beliefs. To this end, we utilize information embedded in short-term options and exploit cross-sectional differences in firms'...

Politicians' behavioral changes as an election nears have typically been attributed to the incentive effects of an election. I document that behavioral changes can occur even for unelected judges.Using data from 1925-2002 on U.S. appellate judges, who are appointed for life, I find that just...