The results achieved by the project include four published academic articles and three completed working papers.
“The Political Economy of Transportation Investment” (Economics of Transportation 2018) explains infrastructure development in wealthy democracies through a tug-of-war between city residents suffering nuisance costs, suburbanites enjoying the benefits of shorter commutes, and taxpayers nationwide funding infrastructure subsidies. As city incomes rise and community organization improves, this theory accounts for the shift from overbuilding and neglect of neighborhood disruption to underbuilding and overexpenditure on mitigation.
“A Theory of Economic Unions” (Journal of Monetary Economics 2020) studies international unions as a way to remove regulatory barriers to trade. The theory traces their distributional consequences across member states and across sectors within each country. Empirical evidence confirms the theoretical predictions: euroskepticism is strongest in EU countries with a large domestic market and more sectors experiencing a trade deficit with the rest of the Union.
“Securing Property Rights” (Journal of Political Economy 2021) studies the enforcement mechanisms that protect property rights. When officials can be suborned, compensation for damages is liable to fail and less fact-intensive remedies are efficient: simple injunction, or regulation when relationships are multilateral and complex. Evidence on US water pollution confirms that federal regulation addressed the failures of litigation identified by the theory. It improved water quality the most in states with the worst government corruption, reducing spatial disparities.
“Globalization and Political Structure” (Journal of the European Economic Association 2022) explains the historical relationship between economic globalization and the geographic structure of government. As technology expands opportunities for trade, trade-hindering borders become costlier. The optimal response was first to eliminate borders by expanding country size. In a second wave of globalization, it is best instead to eliminate the cost of borders through international institutions, and shrink country size. This theory also accounts for the rise and fall of imperialism. Evidence confirms the key theoretical prediction: growth in trade predicts country expansion in the 19th century, but not after 1945.
“Fundamental Errors in the Voting Booth” (presented in Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, the UK and the US) studies how voters’ demand for policies, politicians and institutions is distorted by the Fundamental Attribution Error, a key psychological bias. When voters observe successful leaders, they misattribute success to personal characteristics like skill and rectitude, rather than environmental factors like favorable macroeconomic conditions or democratic checks and balances. This theory can explain popular support for a slide into authoritarianism.
“The Dracula Effect: Voter Information and Trade Policy” (presented in Germany, Italy, Spain, Switzerland and the UK) explains protectionism as a result of endogenous information asymmetries across voters. Trade barriers reap electoral rewards because they are disproportionately noticed by their beneficiaries. This theory predicts that exposure of a sector to media scrutiny reduces its trade barriers. Evidence on US manufacturing industries confirms this prediction, exploiting variation in news coverage driven by the timing of industrial accidents relative to major newsworthy events.
“Do Incompetent Politicians Breed Populist Voters? Evidence from Italian Mayors” (presented in Italy, the UK and the US) presents evidence that support for anti-establishment parties decreases when elected officials are more capable and effective. It identifies a causal relationship by focusing on variation in the ability of local politicians driven by discontinuous changes in their compensation at sharp population thresholds.
continuous changes in their compensation at sharp population thresholds.
