Economic Systems

In this chapter we survey recent advances in modeling cultural transmission in the economics literature. We first present the basic canonical model of the evolution of cultural traits in the social sciences. Both Economics and Evolutionary anthropology build on this canonical model but their...

We consider the political consequences of the use of artificial intelligence (AI) by online platforms engaged in social media content dissemination, entertainment, or electronic commerce. We identify two distinct but complementary mechanisms, the social media channel and the digital ads channel,...

In this paper, we establish a causal connection between two of the most salient social developments in the United States over the past decades: the opioid epidemic and the political realignment between the Republican and Democratic parties. Drawing on unsealed records from litigation against Purdue...

We discuss a wide range of measures of social heterogeneity, both theoretically and empirically. In our framework, individuals who differ from each other either in terms of their identity traits or of their cultural values experience antagonism toward each other. Depending on the type of...

Geoeconomics is the use of a countrys economic strength to exert influence on foreign entities to achieve geopolitical or economic goals. We discuss how concepts of power in the political science and economics literature can be used to guide research on geoeconomics. Economic threats as a form of...

This study reviews the culture and institutions of Confucianism and explores their implications for the trajectory of Chinas historical development. We trace the origins and evolution of the core elements of Confucianism and synthesize research on its relationship to clan culture, state institutions...

We consider the political consequences of the use of artificial intelligence (AI) by online platforms engaged in social media content dissemination, entertainment, or electronic commerce. We identify two distinct but complementary mechanisms, the social media channel and the digital ads channel,...

Research on female political representation has tended to overlook the traditional role of women as leaders across many societies. Our study aims to address this gap by investigating the enduring influence of historical female political leadership on contemporary formal political representation in...

We present a methodology for decoupling taste-based versus statistical discrimination in political behavior. We combine a flexible empirical model of voting, featuring vertical and horizontal candidate differentiation in gender, ability, and policy positions, with a large-scale micro-targeted...

This chapter reviews the literature on the relationship between culture and political preferences. We distinguish conceptually between the direct cultural transmission of political ideology and the transmission of more primitive preferences and beliefs that influence preferences over policies,...

This paper examines how power lawyers shape judicial and economic outcomes by studying the revolving door between judges and lawyers in Chinas judicial systemnamely, former judges who quit the bench to practice law. In otherwise identical lawsuits, revolving-door lawyers deliver 823% higher win rate...

This paper presents a holistic view of the channels of political influence of large corporations in modern democracies, focusing not only on well-studied instruments, such as campaign contributions and lobbying, but also on more opaque ones, such as charitable giving, political connections, dark...

My research suggests that world inequality is explained by the incidence of extractive and inclusive institutions. But why do some countries have extractive institutions? I distinguish between two main reasons; first, power relations; second, the normative order. Normative orders provide...

Geoeconomics is the use of a countrys economic strength to exert influence on foreign entities to achieve geopolitical or economic goals. We discuss how concepts of power in the political science and economics literature can be used to guide research on geoeconomics. Economic threats as a form of...

Firms can increase the demand for their products and consolidate their market power not only by increasing user utility but also by decreasing non-user utility. In this paper, we examine this mechanism by considering the case of smartphones. In particular, Apple has faced criticism for allegedly...

Public service reforms often provoke political backlash. Can they also yield political benefits for the politicians who champion them? We study a Wisconsin law that weakened teachers unions and liberalized pay, prompting mass protests. Exploiting its staggered implementation across school districts,...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 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...

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 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...

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...

Many influential 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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...