When politicians are provided with insufficient incentives by the democratic election mechanism, we show that social welfare can be improved by threshold contracts. A threshold incentive contract stipulates a performance level which a politican must reach in order to have the right to stand for...

Rational choice theories assume that voters accurately assess the outcomes of policies. However, many important policies - such as regulating prices and introducing Pigouvian taxation - yield outcomes through indirect or equilibrium effects that may differ from their direct effects. Citizens may...

It is increasingly common in empirical research to merge data sets containing different units of observation. When the units are not nested, a crosswalk specifying how the units from one data source are allocated to the units of the other is needed. Unfortunately, most crosswalks are ad hoc, a...

We investigate whether term limits can help historically underrepresented groups, such as women, gain faster access to positions of political power. We exploit evidence from Italian local elections where, in a context of rapidly increasing women's presence in politics, mayoral term limits were...

Citizens and politicians rely on their knowledge of a pension system, particularly its redistributive features, when forming their preferences and evaluating its fairness. Taking advantage of the Bismarckian rule of proportionality in Germany, we provide experimental and survey-based evidence...

We model a rent-seeking contest among two "identity ideologues", differentially located along a uni-dimensional identity continuum, and a "mercenary", who can choose any location in-between. The contest jointly awards an identity-relevant good ("religion") and an identity-irrelevant good...

This article examines the effect of leader longevity in power on world happiness. To make the assessment, a sample composed of 135 countries observed over the period 2006 to 2018 was constituted. The results obtained from OLS estimates show that longevity in power reduces individual happiness....

We propose a theory of protest dynamics with heterogeneous protest technology and intensity. The ability to mobilize online reduces the likelihood of coordination failures at both the extensive (engagement) and intensive (violence) margins. Social media can initially help launch massive...

This study employs the firm-level political risk (FLPR) measure proposed by Hassan et al. (2019) to explore the association between firms’ political risk and their earnings management practices. Test results confirm that firms facing higher FLPR engage in higher real and accrual-based earnings...

We examine the effects of endogenous sequences on the fairness in round-robin tournaments with four players, multiple prizes, and general contest technologies. A tournament is called horizontally ex-ante fair if symmetric contestants have the same expected payoffs (odds) before the tournament...