The Value of Political Power: Estimating Returns to Office in Post-War British Politics (joint with Jens Hainmueller, September 25, 2008) Many recent studies show that firms profit from connections to influential politicians, but less is known about how much politicians financially benefit from wielding political influence. We estimate the returns to serving in Parliament using original data on the estates of recently deceased British politicians. Applying both matching and a regression discontinuity design to compare MPs with parliamentary candidates who narrowly lost, we find that serving in office almost doubled the wealth of Conservative MPs but had no discernible financial benefits for Labour MPs. Conservative MPs profited from office largely through lucrative outside employment they acquired as a result of their political positions; we show that gaining a seat in Parliament increased the probability that a Conservative politician would later serve as a director of a publicly-traded firm. We suggest that Labour MPs did not profit from office largely because trade unions effectively monopolized the market for political services by controlling the party and its politicians. Our findings provide evidence relevant to a growing theoretical and empirical literature assessing the relationship between the financial rewards of political office and the quality of politicians. (Article in The Guardian about working paper version)
Politics and the Press: A Content Analysis of Newspaper Coverage of Hurricane Katrina (poster, joint with Mike Kellermann, May 14, 2007) We compare 31 US newspapers' coverage of the Katrina disaster by performing hundreds of LexisNexis keyword searches using terms like "incompetence" and "racism." We find that in the first weekend after the hurricane's landfall, newspapers differed quite significantly in the extent to which they addressed themes of government failure and social/racial equity, as measured by our searches. In particular, newspapers that endorsed President Bush in the 2004 election were far less likely to raise issues of race or poverty and somewhat less likely to raise issues of government incompetence. This discrepancy largely disappeared by the next weekend, as Bush-endorsing papers increased the attention they devoted to these themes.
Public Goods and Private Associations (March 17, 2006) Abstract: This paper investigates the relationship between a democratic public sector and exclusive associations like gated communities. My model departs from earlier studies of this relationship in that I depict the public sector government as an aggregator of individual preferences rather than as a social welfare maximizer. I demonstrate two ways in which an association can affect its members’ demand for public goods. In certain circumstances, these changes in individual demand can affect the collectively determined level of public goods, which in turn induces individual positions for and against the association. The ultimate goal of the paper is to describe how an idealized democratic society would choose what types of associations to allow. In my model, there are both winners and losers when the level of public good provision changes as the result of an association. My analysis illustrates that in most cases an alliance of winners outside the association with a subset of association members is sufficient to overcome any democratic opposition to the association.
How Much Do Trade Agreements Increase Trade? A Matching-based Approach (January 30, 2006) Abstract: There has been much speculation about whether the recent proliferation of preferential trade agreements (PTAs) signifies a step toward freer world trade or a retreat into regionalism. But doubts remain about a prior question, which is whether PTAs affect trade flows between members at all. In this paper, I address this question using matching, a technique that reduces the dependence of estimated effects on untestable modeling assumptions. In contrast to other studies that yield drastically different estimates depending on model specification, my approach produces the robust finding that PTAs increase bilateral trade flows by 15% -- 25% five years after creation.
Rabbit Hutches: Did Land Use Politics Shortchange Japanese Consumers? (January 25, 2006) During the "bubble era" of the Japanese economy, it seemed clear to Kent Calder and others that policy choices were largely responsible for the fact that Japanese people lived in small, low-quality, and expensive housing. Housing, then, seemed to be another of the areas in which the state put industrial growth and well-connected business interests ahead of consumer welfare. In retrospect, I argue, the case is not so clear: policy in public housing, land use control, and real estate lending suggest that the state was doing its part to supply more and better housing to consumers. This is essentially a review paper, and a hasty one at that, but I might want to return to it someday; the now-suspect criticisms of Japanese housing policy I discuss are somewhat reminiscent of arguments made by Ed Glaeser and others that high housing prices in some US cities today are largely due to constraints on supply.