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Valentino Larcinese, Riccardo Puglisi and James M. Snyder, Jr.
We study the agenda-setting political behavior of a large sample of U.S. newspapers during the last decade, and the behavior of smaller samples for longer time periods. Our purpose is to examine the intensity of coverage...Read more...
March 2008
Christian List
While a large social-choice-theoretic literature discusses the aggregation of individual judgments into collective ones, there is relatively little formal work on the transformation of individual judgments in group delib...Read more...
March 2007
Samuel Berlinski, Torun Dewan and Keith Dowding
We study the effects of individual and collective ministerial performance on the length of time a minister serves in British government from 1945-97, using the number of resignation calls for a minister as an individual ...Read more...
February 2007
Torun Dewan and David P. Myatt
Party activists wish to (i) advocate the best policy and yet (ii) unify behind a common party line. An activist?s understanding of his environment is based on the speeches of party leaders. A leader?s influence, measured...Read more...
Lars P. Feld, Justina A.V. Fischer and Gebhard Kirchgassner
There is an intensive dispute in political economics about the impact of institutions on income redistribution. While the main focus is on comparison between different forms of representative democracy, the influence of ...Read more...
October 2006
Party activists face a coordination problem: a critical mass (a barrier to coordination) must advocate a single policy alternative if the party is to succeed. The need for direction is the degree to which the merits of t...Read more...
Christian Bj?rnskov, Axel Dreher and Justina A.V. Fischer
This paper explores a wide range of cross-country determinants of life satisfaction exploiting a database of 90,000 observations in 70 countries. We distinguish four groups of aggregate variables as potential determinant...Read more...
September 2006
Riccardo Puglisi
I analyze a dataset of news from the New York Times, from 1946 to 1997. Controlling for the incumbent President's activity across issues, I find that during the presidential campaign the New York Times gives more emphasi...Read more...
April 2006
Valentino Larcinese, James M. Snyder, Jr. and Cecilia Testa
This paper tests various hypotheses about distributive politics by studying the distribution of federal spending across U.S. states over the period 1978-2002. We improve on previous work by using survey data to measure t...Read more...
Valentino Larcinese
The amount of political information that voters decide to acquire during an electoral campaign depends, among other things, on prior ideological beliefs about parties and/or candidates. Voters that are ex ante indifferen...Read more...
March 2006
Timothy Besley and Ian Preston
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February 2006
Samuel Berlinski, Keith Dowding and Torun Dewan
We analyse the determinants of ministerial hazard rates in the UK from 1945-1997. We focus on three sets of attributes i) personal characteristics of the minister; ii) political characteristics of the minister and iii) c...Read more...
December 2005
Timothy Besley and Valentino Larcinese
This paper studies determinants of MPs expense claims in Parliament using the data released under the freedom of information act in 2004. Using a multiple regression framework, we correlate expenses with three sets of va...Read more...
November 2005
Irma Clots-Figueras
This paper uses panel data from the 16 main states in India during the period 1967- 1999 to study the effects of having higher female representation in the State Legislatures on public goods, policy and expenditure. I fi...Read more...
October 2005
Franz Dietrich and Christian List
In response to recent work on the aggregation of individual judgments on logically connected propositions into collective judgments, it is often asked whether judgment aggregation is a special case of Arrowian preference...Read more...
Timothy Besley and A. Abigail Payne
One of the most striking changes in labor market policy of the past fifty years has come in the form of legislation to limit discrimination in the workplace based on race, gender, disability and age. If such measures are...Read more...
August 2005
Jean-Paul Faguet
I examine decentralization through the lens of the local dynamics that it unleashes. The national effects of decentralization are simply the sum of its local-level effects. Hence to understand decentralization we must fi...Read more...
Stephen J. Redding and Daniel M. Sturm
This paper exploits the division of Germany after the Second World War and the reunification of East and West Germany in 1990 as a natural experiment to provide evidence of the importance of market access for economic de...Read more...
Pataporn Sukontamarn
This paper uses household, school, and test score data from Bangladesh to compare and contrast the effectiveness of NGO-run and state-run schools in the provision of primary education. I study how the entry of NGOs in pr...Read more...
In the theory of judgment aggregation on logically connected propositions, an important question remains open: Which aggregation rules are manipulable and which are strategy-proof? We define manipulability and strategy-p...Read more...
Timothy Besley and Andrea Prat
It has long been recognized that the media play an essential role in government accountability. However, even in the absence of censorship, the government may influence news content by maintaining a ?cozy? relationship w...Read more...
Timothy Besley, Vijayendra Rao and Rohini Pande
This paper uses household data from India to examine the economic and social status of village politicians, and how individual and village characteristics a?ect politician behavior while in o?ce. Education increases the ...Read more...
Timothy Besley and Michael Smart
This paper explores the logic of fiscal restraints in a political agency model with both moral hazard and adverse selection. The role of the political process is both to discipline incumbents who may act against the publ...Read more...
July 2005
Timothy Besley, Torsten Persson and Daniel M. Sturm
One of the most cherished propositions in economics is that market competition by and large raises consumer welfare. But whether political competition has similarly virtuous consequences is far less discussed. This paper...Read more...
June 2005
Valentino Larcinese, Leonzio Rizzo and Cecilia Testa
This paper provides new evidence on the determinants of the US federal budget allocation to the states. Departing from the existing literature that gives prominence to Congress, we carry on an empirical investigation on ...Read more...
Ernst R. Berndt, Rachel Glennerster, Michael R. Kremer, Jean Lee, Ruth Levine and Georg Weizsacker
To overcome the problem of insufficient research and development (R&D) on vaccines for diseases concentrated in low-income countries, sponsors could commit to purchase viable vaccines if and when they are developed. One ...Read more...
April 2005
A number of recent formal models predict a positive effect of political knowledge on turnout. Both information acquisition and turnout, however, are likely to be determined by a similar set of variables, rendering hard t...Read more...
February 2005
