Political economy

    Papers & Opinions


    Paper


    Posted on 22 July 2025

    This paper develops a unified framework linking credit rationing, electoral politics, and credit terms. Vote-share-maximizing politicians moderate policy in response to credit market frictions, generating an endogenous asymmetry that limits...

    Paper


    Posted on 6 January 2025

    This paper studies how partisanship affects mutual fund information processing at the firm level. Using textual analysis of earnings call transcripts, I identify discussions on partisan-sensitive topics, such as climate...

    Paper


    Posted on 20 December 2024

    This paper shows that corporate lobbying generates within-industry effects. Firms that do not lobby experience negative stock returns around the passage of new federal bills and resolutions that attract more...

    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 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 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...

    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 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 September 2021

    What explains the worldwide changes in central bank design over the past five decades? Using a new dataset on central bank institutional design, this paper investigates the timing, pace and...

    Opinion


    Posted on 17 August 2021

    Despite the commonly held views of economists on regulatory capture, our profession has been much more hesitant in recognising similar conflicts of interests that may exist in economics research. This...

    Opinion


    Posted on 4 August 2021

    A rapidly expanding literature has shown the importance of political economy factors for legislative and regulatory actions in the financial sector and ultimately financial sector stability and efficiency. This column...

    Opinion


    Posted on 6 July 2021

    This post reports on recent work presented at the first edition of the CEPR Conference Series on the Political Economy of Finance, which focused on the politics of regulation and...