This paper presents and structurally estimates a model of endogenous network formation and legislative activity of career-motivated politicians. Employing data on socialization and legislative effort of members of the 105th-110th U.S. Congresses, our model reconciles a set of empirical...

We empirically investigate two key dynamic features of advertising competition in elections using a new dataset of very high-frequency, household-level television viewing matched to campaign advertising exposures. The resulting dataset comprises more than 100,000 ad airings. First, we show that...

This paper presents and structurally estimates a model of endogenous network formation and legislative activity of career-motivated politicians. Employing data on socialization and legislative effort of members of the 105th-110th U.S. Congresses, our model reconciles a set of empirical...

ABSTRACT. This paper studies when and why firms prefer more direct forms of state capture (i.e using state officials) to more indirect ones (i.e., using elected officials, to influence bureaucrats). First, we propose a principalagent model under political uncertainty. Firms can induce market...

This article studies the role of political distortions in driving economic growth and development in Africa. We first discuss how existing theories based on long-run structural factors (e.g., pre-colonial and colonial institutions, or ethnic diversity) may not capture new data patterns in the...