The effect of public financing on candidate reemergence and success in elections

In this paper, I estimate the causal effect of public funding of elections on candidates' reemergence and success using a regression discontinuity design in the context of South Korean municipal legislative elections. I find that public financing has no overall effect on candidate reemergence and success in a subsequent election. I do find, however, that campaign expense reimbursement has a positive effect on those who are formerly underrepresented in politics, especially women, in whose case it increases the probability of running again by 24.6 percentage points and that of winning the next election by 10.1 percentage points. I also find some suggestive evidence that campaign expense reimbursement can help female candidates become career politicians.     

Birthplace favoritism and the distribution of budget amendments in Brazil: Evidence from nondistrict elections

In this paper, we investigate whether federal deputies in Brazil display birthplace favoritism in allocating discretionary resources to municipalities via budgetary amendments. The data include information on three electoral cycles and on more than five thousand municipalities. Unlike previous research, we match data on an elected deputy’s share of votes by municipality and the value of the legislative amendments per capita obtained for each municipality by that deputy. Our results suggest that although resource distribution through amendments is smaller than targeted pork spending, birthplace favoritism is still an important driver of local politicians’ behavior. On average, when a Brazilian municipality is the place of birth of a deputy, it obtains 8.7% more amendments per capita than its counterparts. Additionally, our findings suggest that some deputies display birthplace favoritism because they plan to run for mayor in their hometown in subsequent elections.     

Corruption and legislature size: Evidence from Brazil

This paper studies whether and how legislatures affect political corruption. Using a regression discontinuity design in the context of Brazilian municipalities, we find a positive causal impact of council size on corruption levels, as detected by random federal audits. This indicates that an extra councilor represents an additional political actor potentially interested in diverting public resources, which we define as a rent extraction effect. However, we find further evidence that, in some contexts, larger councils enhance the representation of opposition parties and effectively increase monitoring over the executive, attenuating the rent extraction effect. Namely, in municipalities where opposition parties are typically underrepresented, the additional seat in the council is absorbed by the opposition and corruption outcomes do not worsen. In addition, only in such context, mayors are more commonly sentenced for misconduct in office by judicial authorities, whose investigations anecdotally often originates from councilors denouncing mayors to local courts. Overall, our findings show that legislature size is detrimental to corruption outcomes but less so where the representation of opposition parties improves with the enlargement of the legislature.     

Relative age effects in political selection

We exploit a regression discontinuity design to provide causal evidence of the relative age effect (RAE) on a long-run adult age outcome: Political selection. We find strong evidence of the RAE in politics in Finland. However, the effect is heterogeneous: We find that male candidates born early in the calendar year have a significantly higher probability of getting elected to the parliament but no similar RAE applies to female candidates nor to municipal elections. Moreover, this effect only takes place in the most competitive parliamentary districts and is present only for some parties. We also find that in all the groups where the RAE does not exist, early-born candidates are under-represented suggesting attrition of talent in the candidate placement. Overall, our results show that seemingly artificial cutoffs imposed by the government have persistent consequences even on the selection to the highest positions of power within a society.     

Turnout in concurrent elections: Evidence from two quasi-experiments in Italy

We study the effects of different types of concurrent elections using individual-level administrative and survey data from Italy. Exploiting different voting ages for the two Houses of Parliament in a voter-level Regression Discontinuity Design, we find no effect of Senate voting eligibility on voter turnout or information acquisition. We also estimate city-level Differences-in-Differences showing that concurrent high-salience municipal elections increase turnout in lower-salience provincial and European elections, but not vice-versa. These concurrency effects are concentrated in municipalities in the South of Italy, possibly due to weaker political parties and lower levels of social capital.     

Unveiling the effects of a headscarf ban: Evidence from municipal jobs in Turkey

Religious conservatism is often associated with patriarchal attitudes and deterioration of women’s rights. This conventional wisdom has motivated ubiquitous policies that limit public expressions of religion and emphasize secular values. This paper demonstrates that a policy change which undermines secularity ends up empowering women. The current article takes advantage of a unique divergence in political institutions that occurred in Turkey’s recent history to explore how revoking a headscarf ban affected employment outcomes of women in the public sector. In a difference-in-discontinuities setting, I exploit the before/after discontinuous policy variation and compare female employment within municipalities that have Islamist and secular mayors. I find that eliminating legal obstacles against observant Muslim women in the labor market improves female employment in Islamist municipalities. Yet, when women are not allowed to wear headscarves to work, Islamist mayors employ less women vis-à-vis secular mayors. Overall, findings point to unintended consequences of headscarf bans on pious women.     

Political favoritism by powerful politicians: Evidence from chief ministers in India

We study whether in single-member-district legislative systems, powerful politicians engage in political favoritism towards their constituents. The focus is on the chief ministers of Indian state governments. Using night light intensity as a measure of economic activity, we find that a constituency represented by a sitting chief minister exhibits about 13 percentage increase in luminosity relative to all other constituencies. The effect comes predominantly from the cases where the chief minister's constituency lies outside their birth region. Neighboring constituencies, particularly those with strategic political value, also benefit from this windfall, suggesting the mechanism at play is likely to be political expediency rather than in-group favoritism.     

Fiscal rules to tame the political budget cycle: Evidence from Italian municipalities

The paper provides evidence that fiscal rules can limit the political budget cycle. It uses data on Italian municipalities during the 2000s and shows that: 1) municipalities are subject to political budget cycles in capital spending; 2) the Italian sub-national fiscal rule (Domestic Stability Pact, DSP) introduced in 1999 has been enforced by the central government; 3) municipalities subject to the fiscal rule show more limited political budget cycles than municipalities not subject to the rule. In order to identify the effect, we rely on the fact that the domestic fiscal rule does not apply to municipalities below 5000 inhabitants. We find that the political budget cycle increases real capital spending by about 10–20 percent on average in the years prior to municipal elections and that municipalities subject to the DSP show a pre-electoral increase in capital spending which is only a quarter of the one of municipalities not subject to the rule.     

Political openness and armed conflict: Evidence from local councils in Colombia

In this paper, I empirically investigate how the openness of political institutions to diverse representation can impact conflict-related violence. Regression discontinuity estimates that exploit plausibly exogenous variations in the number of councillors in Colombian municipalities show that political openness substantially decreases conflict-related violence, namely the killing of civilian non-combatants. Empirical evidence suggests that the lower level of political violence stems from parties with close links to armed groups having greater representation on larger municipal councils. Using data about the types of violence employed by these groups, and government representation, I argue that armed violence has decreased not because of power-sharing arrangements involving armed groups linked to the parties with more political representation, but rather because armed groups with more political power deter other groups from initiating certain types of violence.     

Participatory budgeting and the pattern of local government spending: Evidence from South Korea

We use a panel of Korean municipalities to examine the impact of participatory budgeting on local government expenditures. We find that participatory budgeting systematically alters the pattern of local spending. Municipalities using participatory budgeting reallocate resources toward more immediate and visible expenditures and away from long-term development expenditure. We also find evidence that participatory budgeting affects the municipal budget by a greater amount than the expenditures directly allocated through participatory budgeting. Our findings indicate that participatory budgeting leads to the reallocation of local public spending by increasing information flows between policymakers and service users.     

Gender difference in the impact of retirement on cognitive abilities: Evidence from urban China

This paper examines the impact of retirement on cognitive functioning by gender in urban China and investigates the underlying mechanisms. Based on data from the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study, the paper uses the mandatory retirement ages and different policy enforcement between the public and private sectors as instruments for retirement status. The analysis finds substantial gender heterogeneity in the effect of retirement on cognition, with a positive and significant effect for males, but a negative and less significant effect for females. The beneficial effects on cognition are stronger for male blue-collar workers, who are likely to pursue a more active lifestyle at retirement. Further investigation shows that the results are partly driven by differential behavioral changes at retirement, and the gender difference in retirement ages may also play a potential role.     

Expressive voting with booing and cheering: Evidence from Britain

Previous work on Expressive Voting has focused on the desire of voters to express what they are for and thus who they are. But, often also as important, is the desire of voters to express what they are against, and who they are not. In this paper we extend the standard formulation of Expressive Voting to account for this possibility. Using data for the UK we find empirical evidence that the desire to boo has been increasingly important at recent elections. The implications of this for recent trends in political polarization are discussed.     

The Impact of Gender Quotas on Votes for Women Candidates: Evidence from Italy

To explore the impact of quotas on women's political representation, this study estimates a conditional multinomial logit for the probability of voting for men and women, utilizing data that includes all regional candidates in four Italian regions in 1995 and 2000. This regional electoral system allows voters to choose both the party and the specific candidate (open-list proportional system). The results show that the introduction of a 50 percent gender quota in candidate lists leads to a substantial increase in the probability that voters will choose women candidates, from 12 to 36 percent. Nevertheless, the probability of voting for women (36 percent) is lower than the probability for men (64 percent). Voters have a male bias in Italy. Both the district size and the political party have an effect on the probability of voting for women versus men. The more liberal the party is, the higher the probability that women receive votes.     

Term limit extension and electoral participation. Evidence from a diff-in-discontinuities design at the local level in Italy

We study the effect of term limits on voter turnout in Italian local elections. Since 2014 the Italian law allows mayors in municipalities with a population size lower than 3,000 inhabitants to re-run for a third term, whereas mayors in cities with a number of residents above the cut-off still face a two-term limit. The introduction of the reform permits us to implement a difference-in-discontinuities design exploiting the before/after with the discontinuous policy change. We find that voters negatively react to the introduction of the reform: electoral participation decreases by about 5 percentage points in municipalities eligible to the treatment compared to municipalities in the control group. This negative effect is essentially driven by a decrease in the political competition. We also find that relaxing term limits does not improve the quality of politicians running for election.     

On the determinants of local government performance: A two-stage nonparametric approach

This article analyzes the efficiency of local governments in the Comunitat Valenciana (Spain) and their main explanatory variables. The analysis is performed in two stages. Firstly, efficiency is measured via (nonparametric) activity analysis techniques. Specifically, we consider both Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) and Free Disposable Hull (FDH) techniques. The second stage identifies some critical determinants of efficiency, focusing on both political and fiscal policy variables. In contrast to previous two-stage research studies, our approach performs the latter attempt via nonparametric smoothing techniques, rather than econometric methods such as OLS or Tobit related techniques. Results show that efficiency scores, especially under the nonconvexity assumption (FDH), are higher for large municipalities. Thus, there is empirical evidence to suggest that resources may be better allocated by large municipalities. However, the inefficiency found is not entirely attributable to poor management, as second-stage analysis reveals both fiscal and political variables to be explicably related to municipality performance. Moreover, the explanatory variables’ impact on efficiency is robust to the chosen technique—either convex DEA or nonconvex FDH.     

The Impact of Immigration on the Size of Government: Empirical Evidence from Danish Municipalities

Several studies have reported a negative relationship between ethnic heterogeneity and the size of the public sector. One problem with this literature is that ethnic composition is hardly exogenous, which obstructs attempts to reveal causal mechanisms. This paper explores the impact of changes in ethnic heterogeneity in Danish municipalities from 1995 through 2001, a period marked by an unprecedented influx of refugees. A state‐sponsored placement policy restricted their choice of residence and required local governments to accept them as citizens. The analysis of the impact of this influx has not revealed any support for the claim of a decline in public sector size.     

Competitive experience and gender difference in risk preference,trust preference and academic performance: Evidence from Gaokao in China

This study examines whether and how competitive experience affects gender difference in the preferences for risk and trust as well as academic performance. By utilizing the provincial differences in college admission rates as an indicator of competitive experience for students, we assess its relationship with gender difference in risk preference, trust preference, and academic performance. We find that females from provinces with lower college admission rates are more risk averse and less trustful, and perform better in more competitive environment, compared with their male counterparts. Our study suggests that observed gender differences may partially reflect the effects of schooling environment rather than inherent gender traits.     

The effects of implicit contracts on wages: Evidence from the Japanese labor market

This paper tests whether wages in Japan’s labor market are determined by current or past labor market conditions. The empirical results are consistent with a model suggesting that labor market mobility may be limited and costly in Japan for men.     

Gender Differences in Educational Attainment: Evidence on the Role of Tracking from a Finnish Quasi‐experiment

In this paper we study the relationship between the timing of tracking of pupils into vocational and academic secondary education and gender differences in educational attainment and income. It is argued that in a comprehensive system, where students are tracked into vocational and academic schools relatively late (age 15–16), girls are more likely to choose the academic track than boys. We exploit the Finnish comprehensive school reform of the 1970s to analyse this hypothesis. This changed the Finnish school system from a selective to a comprehensive structure and postponed tracking from the age of 10–11 to 15–16. Since the reform was not implemented at the same time throughout the country, we can observe members of the same cohorts under both systems. The shift to a comprehensive system was found to increase gender differences in the probability of choosing an academic secondary education and of continuing onto academic tertiary education. Moreover, the reform decreased the gender wage gap in adult income by four percentage points.