Papers & Opinions


Paper


Posted on 12 October 2024

Can political beliefs, particularly about benefits of war versus peace, move thick financial markets? We document that following an unlikely victory by French citizen-soldiers during the German Siege of Paris...

Paper


Posted on 5 August 2024

We review an empirical literature that studies how political polarization affects financial decisions. We first discuss the degree of partisan segregation in finance and corporate America, the mechanisms through which...

Paper


Posted on 1 May 2024

Can participation in financial markets lead individuals to reevaluate the costs of conflict, change their political attitudes, and even their votes? Prior to the 2015 Israeli elections, we randomly assigned...

Paper


Posted on 25 April 2024

We document that in the wake of the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision, which increased in the ability of the wealthy to finance political campaigns, the share of total electoral...

Paper


Posted on 19 April 2024

How can we build trust, especially in polarized societies? We propose that exposure to broad financial markets—where individuals place their assets in the hands of large groups of unfamiliar agents...

Paper


Posted on 22 March 2024

The English Parliament’s struggle for supremacy against monarchical dictatorship during the Civil War (1642–1648) was crucial for the establishment of representative government, yet its lessons continue to be debated. I...

Opinion


Posted on 6 November 2023

This year’s edition of the CEPR Conference Series on the Political Economy of Finance took place in the beautiful Wereldmuseum in Rotterdam. This edition gathered a great lineup of scholars...

Paper


Posted on 11 May 2023

Using data on roll-call voting patterns of U.S. state legislators from 1993 to 2016, we find a negative relationship between firm investment and state legislative polarization, measured as the ideological...

Paper


Posted on 20 April 2023

In the last three decades, legal delegation of monetary policy to independent central banks (CBI) has achieved the status of a global norm of good governance. The recent backlash against this...

Paper


Posted on 29 March 2023

National surveillance is often insufficient to identify transnational issues. One solution to this problem is to delegate to international organizations (IOs) the power to surveil activity in numerous states simultaneously,...

Paper


Posted on 25 January 2023

Since the 1980s many countries have reformed the institutional framework governing their central banks to increase operational independence. Collecting systematic biographical information, international press coverage, and independent expert opinions, we...

Paper


Posted on 3 October 2022

Ideology, the belief system about "how the society should be governed" that some group of people collectively sustains, is a critical factor that motivates economic decisions in democratic countries. However,...

Paper


Posted on 5 September 2022

Does democracy shape international merger activity? If so, how? The short answer is yes because democratic institutions are conducive to higher-quality corporate governance. In a new paper, we examine 104,425...

Paper


Posted on 25 May 2022

We investigate the link between ideology and the sentiments of parliamentarians when they speak to the central bank they hold accountable. To this end, we collect textual data on the...

Paper


Posted on 30 April 2022

The ability to finance conflict likely affects the odds of sustaining a war and succeeding in it. Recent literature explores rebel group funding, but far less is known about how...