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"MPs for Sale? Estimating Returns to Office in Post-War British Politics" (with Andy Eggers). March 2008. PDF.

Abstract: While the role of money in policymaking is a central question in political economy research, surprisingly little attention has been given to the rents politicians actually derive from politics. We use both matching and a regression discontinuity design to analyze an original dataset on the estates of recently deceased British politicians. We find that serving in Parliament roughly doubled the wealth at death of Conservative MPs but had no discernible effect on the wealth of Labour MPs. We argue that Conservative MPs profited from office in a lax regulatory environment by using their political positions to obtain outside work as directors, consultants, and lobbyists, both while in office and after retirement. Our results are consistent with anecdotal evidence on MPs' outside financial dealings but suggest that the magnitude of Conservatives' financial gains from office was larger than has been appreciated.
"Opium for the Masses: How Foreign Free Media Can Stabilize Authoritarian Regimes" (with Holger Kern). August 2007. PDF. A poster for the 2007 Society of Political Methodology Summer Conference can be found here.

Abstract: A common claim in the democratization literature is that foreign free media undermine authoritarian rule. No reliable micro-level evidence on this topic exists, however, since independent survey research is rarely possible in authoritarian regimes and self-selection into media consumption complicates causal inferences. In this case study of the impact of West German television on political attitudes in communist East Germany, we address these problems by making use of previously secret survey data and a natural experiment. While most East Germans were able to tune in to West German broadcasts, some of them were cut off from West German television due to East Germany's topography. We exploit this plausibly exogenous variation to estimate the impact of West German television on East Germans' political attitudes using instrumental variable estimators. Contrary to conventional wisdom, East Germans who watched West German television were more satisfied with life in East Germany and the communist regime. To explain this surprising finding, we demonstrate that West German television's role in transmitting political information not available in the state-controlled communist media was insignificant and that television primarily served as a means of entertainment for East Germans. Archival material on the reaction of the East German regime to the availability of West German television corroborates our argument.
"Synthetic Control Methods for Comparative Case Studies: Estimating the Effect of California's Tobacco Control Program" (with Alberto Abadie and Alexis Diamond). June 2007.
  Free version: PDF. The paper also appeared as: NBER Technical Working Paper 335.
  Companion software is available here.
        Abstract: Building on an idea in Abadie and Gardeazabal (2003), this article investigates the application of synthetic control methods to comparative case studies. We discuss the advantages of these methods and apply them to study the effects of Proposition 99, a large-scale tobacco control program that California implemented in 1988. We demonstrate that following Proposition 99 tobacco consumption fell markedly in California relative to a comparable synthetic control region. We estimate that by the year 2000 annual per-capita cigarette sales in California were about 26 packs lower than what they would have been in the absence of Proposition 99. Given that many policy interventions and events of interest in social sciences take place at an aggregate level (countries, regions, cities, etc.) and affect a small number of aggregate units, the potential applicability of synthetic control methods to comparative case studies is very large, especially in situations where traditional regression methods are not appropriate. The methods proposed in this article produce informative inference regardless of the number of available comparison units, the number of available time periods, and whether the data are individual (micro) or aggregate (macro). Software to compute the estimators proposed in this article is available at the authors’ web-pages.

"Incumbency as a Source of Spillover Effects in Mixed Electoral Systems: Evidence from a Regression-Discontinuity Design" (with Holger Kern). Electoral Studies. Forthcoming 2008. PDF
        Abstract: In this paper we demonstrate empirically that incumbency is a source of contamination in Germany's mixed electoral system. Using a quasi-experimental research design that allows for causal inference under a weaker set of assumptions than the regression models commonly used in the electoral systems literature, we find that incumbency causes a gain of 1.4 to 1.7 percentage points in PR vote shares. We also present simulations of Bundestag seat distributions to demonstrate that contamination effects caused by incumbency are sufficiently large to trigger significant shifts in parliamentary majorities.
     Appendix: PDF

"Beyond Balance: A Placebo Test for Matching Estimators" (with Alexis Diamond). April 2006. PDF
        Abstract: Matching has become a popular method of causal inference but there is no consensus as to how covariate balance obtained via matching ought to be evaluated. We present a new diagnostic called the placebo test that involves comparing two ``placebo'' sets of control units matched to the same set of treated units. The placebo test is designed to aid estimation of the average treatment effect for the treated units, providing information about the extent to which matching (1) reduces bias due to matching discrepancies on observed characteristics and (2) reduces the variance of treatment effect estimates associated with this bias. The placebo test also checks robustness of the matching procedure across multiple models and samples. Importantly, the placebo test does not require outcomes data for the treated group and thus is blind to the answer (the estimated treatment effect), consistent with Rubin (2001)'s call for impartiality in causal inference research design. We probe the plausibility of the placebo test using the National Supported Work Demonstration (NSW) job training dataset of Dehejia and Wahba (1997). We also use our test to validate the Diamond and Sekhon (2005) balance criterion (based on paired t-test and Kolmogorov-Smirnov p-values) and show that a criterion based on the more conventional unpaired t-test does not appear to have desirable properties.

"Educated Preferences: Explaining Individual Attitudes Toward Immigration in Europe" (with Michael Hiscox). International Organization. 61(2) 2007. 399-442. PDF 
        Abstract: Recent studies of individual attitudes toward immigration emphasize concerns about labor market competition as a potent source of anti-immigrant sentiment, in particular among less-educated or less-skilled citizens who fear being forced to compete for jobs with low-skilled immigrants willing to work for much lower wages. We examine new data on attitudes toward immigration available from the 2003 European Social Survey. In contrast to predictions based upon conventional arguments about labor market competition, which anticipate that individuals will oppose immigration of workers with similar skills to their own, but support immigration of workers with different skill levels, we find that people with higher levels of education and occupational skills are more likely to favor immigration regardless of the skill attributes of the immigrants in question. Across Europe, higher education and higher skills mean more support for all types of immigrants. These relationships are almost identical among individuals in the labor force (i.e., those competing for jobs) and those not in the labor force. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, then, the connection between the education or skill levels of individuals and views about immigration appears to have very little, if anything, to do with fears about labor market competition. This finding is consistent with extensive economic research showing that the income and employment effects of immigration in European economies are actually very small. We find that a large component of the effect of education on attitudes toward immigrants is associated with differences among individuals in cultural values and beliefs. More educated respondents are significantly less racist and place greater value on cultural diversity than their counterparts; they are also more likely to believe that immigration generates benefits for the host economy as a whole.
   Appendix: PDF (Contains our formal discussion of open-economy models of immigration)
    Robustness Supplement I: PDF (Analysis of Immigrant Skill Data)
    Robustness Supplement II: PDF (Results of Robustness Checks)
    Robustness Supplement III: PDF (Results with Recoded Dependent Variables)
    Replication Archive: Zip (Code and Data to replicate tables from paper and supplements (9.2 MB))

"Electoral Balancing, Divided Government, and Midterm Loss in German State Elections" (with Holger L. Kern). Journal of Legislative Studies 12 (2) 2006: 127–149. PDF 
        Abstract: This paper takes a fresh look at the midterm loss in German elections and argues that government type is a crucial determinant of midterm loss. Using panel regressions on a newly compiled data set covering all state elections during the period 1949–2004, we find that systematic midterm losses occur only when both chambers of the federal legislature (Bundestag and Bundesrat) are controlled by one party or a party coalition. Prior research has failed to discover this important regularity. These findings lend strong support to electoral balancing models while calling into doubt more traditional explanations of midterm loss.
   Replication Archive: Zip (217 KB Contains Code and Data to replicate all tables in paper)

"Learning to Love Globalization: The Effects of Education on Individual Attitudes Toward International Trade" (with Michael Hiscox). International Organization 60 (2) 2006: 469-498. PDF
        Abstract: Recent studies of public attitudes toward trade have converged on one central finding: support for trade restrictions is highest among respondents with the lowest levels of education. This has been interpreted as strong support for the Stolper-Samuelson theorem, the classic economic treatment of the income effects of trade that predicts that trade openness benefits those owning factors of production with which their economy is relatively well endowed (those with skills in the advanced economies) while hurting others (low-skilled workers). We reexamine the available survey data, showing that the impact of education on attitudes toward trade is almost identical among respondents in the active labor force and those who are not (even those who are retired). We also find that, while individuals with college-level educations are far more likely to favor trade openness than others, other types of education have no significant effects on attitudes, and some actually reduce the support for trade, even though they clearly contribute to skill acquisition. Combined, these results strongly suggest that the effects of education on individual trade preferences are not primarily a product of distributional concerns linked to job skills. We suggest that exposure to economic ideas and information among college-educated individuals plays a key role in shaping attitudes toward trade and globalization. This is not to say that distributional issues are not important in shaping attitudes toward trade - just that they are not clearly manifest in the simple, broad association between education levels and support for free trade.
    Robustness Supplement I: PDF (Results for Robustness Checks and Additional Surveys)
    Robustness Supplement II: PDF (Analysis of economic literacy vs. tolerance)
    Replication Archive: Zip (Code and Data to replicate tables from paper and supplements (23.8MB))

"Can Domestic Institutions Explain Exchange Rate Regime Choice? The Political Economy of Monetary Institutions Reconsidered'' (with Beth Simmons). May 2005. PDF
        Abstract: Recent articles in International Organization and elsewhere have explored the role of domestic institutions in shaping exchange rate regime choice. These articles use some variation on the information reported by governments to the International Monetary Fund as their dependent variable. Even more recently, new data have become available that reflect actual (de facto) rather than declaratory (de jure) policies with respect to exchange rate regimes. The findings of the domestic institutionalists are significantly weakened, and in some cases reversed, when this more appropriate measure is used to test their claims. These tests cast doubt on whether a domestic institutional focus is the most fruitful way to study exchange rate regimes.


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