When reelection is uncertain, the election mechanism may provide insufficient incentives to politicians to implement the socially desirable policy. In this paper, we show that incentive contracts which the candidates offer themselves during the campaign can help to alleviate the problem even if...

We consider a model with a politician facing a multi-task problem while in office. The reelection mechanism distorts the allocation of effort in favor of tasks whose outcomes can be measured more precisely than others. We show that a hierarchy of elections and incentive contracts can alleviate...

We investigate the informal influence of political leaders’ spouses on the subnational allocation of foreign aid. Building new worldwide datasets on personal characteristics of political leaders and their spouses as well as on geocoded development aid projects (including new data on 19...

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...

It has long been observed that there is little money in U.S. politics compared to the stakes. But what if contributions are not fully observable or non-monetary in nature and thus not easily quantifiable? We study this question with a new data set on the top 1000 donors in U.S. congressional...

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...

In this paper we explore how individual social preferences correlate with political support for redistribution. We ran an incentivized experiment with a large representative sample of the Spanish population. Our participants took six decisions that elicited their social preferences. Their...

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...

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...

The study measures scientists' polarization on social media and its impact on public perceptions of their credibility. Analyzing 98,000 scientists on Twitter from 2016 to 2022 reveals significant divergence in expressed political opinions. An experiment assesses the impact of online political...