Existing research on distributive politics mainly focuses on the influence of electoral
competition between political parties, but less is known about non-electoral mechanisms of …

We study patronage politics in authoritarian Vietnam, using an exhaustive panel of ranking
officials from 2000 to 2010 to estimate their promotions' impact on infrastructure in their …

Pork barrel spending is typically attributed to the strategic behavior of political elites hoping
to be electorally rewarded by voters residing in their districts. Such behavior is expected to …

Although politicians' personal attributes are an important component of elections and
representation, few studies have rigorously investigated which attributes are most relevant in …

This paper studies the effect of family connections to politicians on individuals' labor market
outcomes. Using data for Italy spanning more than three decades on a sample of almost one …

I exploit a reform that required Italian municipalities to disclose their balance sheets before
elections to study whether having more informed voters affects the political budget cycle …

Why do politicians with strong local roots receive more electoral support? The mechanisms
underlying this well-documented “friends and neighbors” effect remain largely untested …

While formal institutions are considered rather stable in Western countries, the same cannot
be said of those in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC). In LAC, these institutions are …

We investigate whether politicians award intergovernmental grants to core supporters. Our
new dataset contains information on discretionary project grants from a German state …

We study France's 1995 ban on firm donations to politicians. We use a difference-in-
differences approach and a novel dataset combining the campaign manifestos issued by …