When and how do governments deliver public goods and services in response to citizen
preferences? We review the current literature on government responsiveness, with a focus …

A recent literature has shown that when adoption of a treatment is staggered and average
treatment effects vary across groups and over time, difference-in-differences regression …

To estimate the dynamic effects of an absorbing treatment, researchers often use two-way
fixed effects regressions that include leads and lags of the treatment. We show that in …

This paper discusses two important limitations of the common practice of testing for
preexisting differences in trends (“pre-trends”) when using difference-in-differences and …

In all modern bureaucracies, politicians retain some discretion in public employment
decisions, which may lead to frictions in the selection process if political connections …

This paper studies how the abolition of an elite recruitment system—China's civil exam
system that lasted over 1,300 years—affects political stability. Employing a panel data set …

We combine personnel records of the United States federal bureaucracy from 1997 to 2019
with administrative voter registration data to study how ideological alignment between …

We study how political turnover in mayoral elections in Brazil affects public service provision
by local governments. Exploiting a regression discontinuity design for close elections, we …

This article studies the role of political distortions in driving economic growth and
development in Africa. We first discuss how existing theories based on long-run structural …

We use newly digitized records from the post office to study the effects of strengthened state
capacity between 1875 and 1901. Exploiting the implementation of the Pendleton Act—a …