Economic Systems

This introduction to the Special Issue reviews the existing literature on the domestic politics of international organizations (IOs), presenting them within a unified theoretical framework. We emphasize the central role of domestic forces in the study of IOs: how individual preferences are channeled...

We examine job-seekers' heterogeneous preferences for nonwage amenities, with a focus on environmental, social, and governance (ESG) practices, using an incentivized field experiment in Brazil. Our findings reveal that ESG is the most polarizing nonwage amenity across multiple sociodemographic...

This paper reviews the main motivations and arguments of my work on comparative development, colonialism and institutional change, which was often carried out jointly with James Robinson and Simon Johnson. I then provide a simple framework to organize these ideas and connect them with my research on...

Nearly 400,000 Black men were drafted into the National Army during World War I, where they toiled in segregated units and received little formal training. Leveraging novel variation from the WWI draft lottery and millions of digitized military and NAACP records, we document the pioneering role...

Using data on the residential location and migration for every voter in U.S. states recording partisan registration between 20082020, we find that residential segregation between Democrats and Republicans has increased year over year at all geographic levels, from neighborhoods to Congressional...

What does it take to live a meaningful life? We exploit a unique corpus of over 1,400 life narratives of older Americans collected by a team of writers during the 1930s. We combine detailed human readings with large language models (LLMs) to extract systematic information on critical junctures,...

We propose a novel time-series econometric framework to forecast U.S. Presidential election outcomes in real time by combining polling data, economic fundamentals, and political prediction market prices. Our model estimates the joint dynamics of voter preferences across states. Applying our approach...

To what extent, if at all, did employee-owned (EO) firms maintain jobs for workers compared to non-EO firms in the spring 2020 Covid-19 shock to the US economy? Did EO firms shift jobs from workplaces to work-from-home locations in the pandemic more or less than other firms? This paper uses a unique...

We survey and summarize recent literature on labor unions in political economy. While labor unions have been a long-standing subject of study in labor and macroeconomics, until recently they have been less studied by political economists, despite being important political actors in many policy...

Field experiments provide the clearest window into the true impact of many policies, allowing us to understand what works, what does not, and why. Yet, their widespread use has not been accompanied by a deep understanding of the political economy of their adoption in policy circles. This study...

We evaluate the effects of a program in Brazil that selects and trains new politicians, addressing three main challenges: selection bias from program screening, self-selection into candidacy, and the need to quantify the contributions of both selection and training in a holistic evaluation. Our...

Public capacity complements urban density because externalities abound in cities and urban scale makes it possible to share infrastructure that needs to be managed. Yet, urban governments face limitations that are not experienced by private sector entities. A city cannot just stop policing if it...

We study the consequences of a clash between contemporary development initiatives and traditional economic practices in Africa. Crop agriculture has expanded considerably across the continent in recent years. Much of this expansion has occurred in traditionally pastoral areas, where land is...

Below, I illustrate how a wide range of political economics forces influence nations' provisions of global public goods. The forces can make it difficult for international cooperation to succeed, but they can also be taken advantage of by carefully designed treaties, so that they are stronger...

We combine societal-level institutional measures from 51 countries between 1996 and 2017 with individual decision-making outcome data from 1,126 laboratory experiments in six meta-analyses to evaluate the effects of within-country institutional change on pro-social and Nash behavior. We find that...

How does forced displacement shape development in origin countries? We examine the case of Venezuela, where over seven million people have been forcibly displaced. Our study compares municipalities with different proportions of foreign-born populations before and after the international oil price...

Amid growing interest in industrial policy, we develop a model exploring the tension between market-driven information discovery and policymakers career incentives. While market-based information discovery can help address informational barriers faced by policymakers, career incentives may lead them...

This paper studies the effect of economic indicators on the Michigan Consumer Sentiment Index, Presidential approval ratings, and Presidential election outcomes since 1956. How closely do the indicators predict sentiment, how well does sentiment predict approval, and what role does approval have in...

Many observers have forecast large partisan shifts in the US electorate based on demographic trends. Such forecasts are appealing because demographic trends are often predictable even over long horizons. We backtest demographic forecasts using data on US elections since 1952. We envision a...

How should society allocate policy-making between the legislative and the executive branches of government? We analyze a model in which biased and polarized policymakers set policy in response to shocks. We show that policy issues for which the policy-maker bias is small relative to the degree of...

This paper investigates whether enduring authoritarian regimes are in part rooted in the populations misperceptions about their social and economic costsas opposed to a general preference for authoritarianism. We explore this question using online and field experiments in the context of Trkiyes May...

Autocracy 2.0, exemplified by modern China, is economically robust, technologically advanced, globally engaged, and controlled through subtle and sophisticated methods. What defines Chinas political economy, and what drives Autocracy 2.0? What is its future direction? I start by discussing two key...

Political leaders make policy choices which are often hard to explain via institutions. We use the behavior of Colombian paramilitary groups as an environment to study non-institutional sources of variation in how public good provision and violence are combined to control populations. We hypothesize...

In recent years, voter ID laws and convenience voting have generated heated partisan debates. To shed light on these policy issues, we survey the recent evidence on the institutional determinants and effects of voter turnout and broaden the perspective beyond the most debated rules. We begin by...

Over the past decade, social media platforms have emerged as prominent vehicles for displaying dissent. In response, various actors have increasingly spread fake news on these platforms to impair the oppositionthe (dis)information war. We analyze a methodology to identify disinformation using...

Because corporate limited liability protects the founders personal assets, creditors often require founders of new, small and risky firms to contract around limited liability by pledging their personal assets as collateral for loans to their firms. This makes personal bankruptcy law (PBL) relevant...

We estimate the effects of privatization on zombie versus healthy state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in China, extending our analysis beyond TFP to a broad array of financial and economic indicators. Privatizing zombie SOEs enhances labor productivity and TFP, reduces bank and government subsidies,...

We propose a model of the interplay of employment relationships and community-based interactions among workers and managers. Employment relations can be either tough (where workers are monitored intensively and obtain few rents, and managers do not provide informal favors for their workers) or soft...

The FDA is responsible for the approval of new drugs, biological products and medical devices in the United States. As part of the approval process, the FDA relies on advisory committees, which provide independent advice from outside experts. We combine a structural approach with newly collected...

We study the descriptive and substantive representation of workers through worker representatives, focusing on the selection of German works council representatives and their impact on worker outcomes. Becoming a professional representative leads to substantial wage gains for the elected,...

Armed groups routinely delegate domains of rule to village customary chiefsindirect rule. The larger a chiefs power over the villagers relative to the groups, the more there is indirect rule. Over time, enabled by the chiefs efforts to legitimize the group, the group expands the taxes they collect...

Career opportunities and expectations shape peoples decisions and can diminish over time. In this paper, we study the career implications of automation and robotization using a novel data set of resumes from approximately 16 million individuals from the United States. We calculate the lifetime...

Donald Trumps campaign speeches have impressed some and outraged others. Yet relatively little is known about how his rhetoric has changed over time and how it compares to that of other politicians, both in the US and abroad. We analyze a monthly series of Trumps addresses in 2015-24, comparing them...

A growing body of work has shown that aggregate shocks affect the formation of preferences and beliefs. This article reviews evidence from sociology, social psychology, and economics to assess the relevance of aggregate shocks, whether the period in which they are experienced matters, and whether...

This essay examines the effects of radical transformations in the liberal characteristics of regimes on foreign direct investors. It focuses on the differing and common patterns in foreign direct investment (FDI) in response to the rise and decline of liberal economic regimes, using the cases of...

We investigate the rise of the religious right in the context of the Moral Majority and Jimmy Carter, the first Evangelical President. During Carter's Presidency, the Moral Majority, an Evangelical group headed by televangelist Jerry Falwell, turned against the incumbent Carter, a Democrat, and...

Using data on U.S. state and federal taxes and transfers over a quarter century, we estimate a regression model that yields the marginal effect of any shift of market income share from one quintile to another on the entire post tax, post-transfer income distribution. We identify exogenous income...

We examine the ways in which political realities shape industrial policy through the lens of modern political economy. We consider two broad governance constraints: i) the political forces that shape how industrial policy is chosen and ii) the ways in which state capacity affects implementation. The...

This paper investigates how non-tax revenues impact tax collection in Brazilian municipalities, focusing on shifts in intergovernmental transfers due to population updates. Our analysis reveals asymmetric effects of shocks: revenue gains lead to increased spending without tax reductions, while...

Kinship ties are a common institution that may facilitate in-group coordination and cooperation. Yet their benefits or lack thereof depend crucially on the broader institutional environment. We study how the prevalence of clan ties affect how communities confronted two well-studied historical...

In a series of experiments, we present evidence of bipartisan public demand for police alternatives, contrasted with persistent policy resistance from key stakeholders. First, our survey experiment demonstrates that introducing U.S. respondents to dontcallthepolice.com (DCTP), a database of non...

Recent social movements stand out by their spontaneous nature and lack of stable leadership, raising doubts on their ability to generate political change. This article provides systematic evidence on the effects of protests on public opinion and political attitudes. Drawing on a database covering...

This paper provides new evidence on a long-standing question asked by Shiller (1997): Why do we dislike inflation? I conducted two surveys on representative samples of the US population to elicit peoples perceptions about the impacts of inflation and their reactions to it. The predominant reason for...

Why are certain movies more successful in some markets than others? Are the entertainment products we consume reflective of our core values and beliefs? These questions drive our investigation into the relationship between a societys oral tradition and the financial success of films. We combine a...

We study a fundamental institution in many societies: the structure of property rights over land. Across societies, communal land rights have been more common than private land rights. We test the hypothesis that longer fallow requirements the time needed to leave land uncultivated to restore...

We study whether information frictions and corruption perceptions deter firms from doing business with the government. We conduct two nationwide randomized controlled trials (RCTs) in collaboration with the national public procurement supervisory and anti-corruption agency in Uganda. The first RCT...

Using rural household survey data from West Bengal, we find that voters respond positively to excludable government welfare benefits but not to local public good programs, while reporting having benefited from both. Consistent with these voting patterns, shocks to electoral competition induced by...

It has been argued that since 2014, under the BJP-led central government, welfare benefits in India have become better targeted and less prone to clientelistic control by state and local governments. Arguably this has helped to increase the vote share of the BJP vis-a-vis regional parties. We test...

Populist politicians have leveraged direct connections with voters to win elections worldwide, often using emotional rather than policy appeals. Do these forms of campaigning work for programmatic politicians as well? We partner with a mainstream opposition political party to implement a field...

Accelerated investment in electricity transmission could reduce total costs and enhance renewable integration. I document static allocative inefficiencies induced by incomplete market integration in two major U.S. markets; these have risen over time and totaled $2 billion in 2022. I also argue that...