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Working Paper
Political Connections, Allocation of Stimulus Spending, and the Jobs Multiplier
Choi, Joonkyu; Penciakova, Veronika; Saffie, Felipe (2021-07)
Using American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) data, we show that firms lever their political connections to win stimulus grants and that public expenditure channeled through politically connected firms hinders job creation. We build a unique database that links information on campaign contributions, state legislative elections, firm characteristics, and ARRA grant allocation. Using exogenous variation in political connections based on ex-post close elections held before ARRA, we causally show that politically connected firms are 38 percent more likely to secure a grant. Based on an ...
Finance and Economics Discussion Series , Paper 2021-005r1

Working Paper
The Effect of Local Economic Shocks on Local and National Elections
Herreño, Juan; Morales, Matias; Pedemonte, Mathieu (2023-03-29)
We study the reaction of voters to shifts in local economic conditions. Using the departure from the gold standard of US trading partners in 1931 and the US in 1933, we exploit heterogeneity in export destinations, creating local differences in expenditure-switching in US counties by isolating the aggregate effects of the monetary shocks using time fixed effects. We find significant changes in local voting behavior in response to both shocks, one originating abroad, and another domestically. The response to both shocks have similar magnitude. We argue that voters punished and rewarded ...
Working Papers , Paper 23-08

Working Paper
Greed as a Source of Polarization
Wright, Mark L. J.; Livshits, Igor (2017-12-28)
The political process in the United States appears to be highly polarized: evidence from voting patterns finds that the political positions of legislators have diverged substantially, while the largest campaign contributions come from the most extreme lobby groups and are directed to the most extreme candidates. Is the rise in campaign contributions the cause of the growing polarity of political views? In this paper, we show that, in standard models of lobbying and electoral competition, a free-rider problem amongst potential contributors leads naturally to a divergence in campaign ...
Working Papers , Paper 18-1

Working Paper
Banking on Deforestation: The Cost of Nonenforcement
Berger, Allen N.; Ortega, Cristina; Ossandon Busch, Matias; Roman, Raluca (2024-12-05)
Despite surging environmental laws, how their enforcement influences banks’ management of climate risks remains underexplored. Using the Brazilian Amazon as a laboratory, we examine the impact of a shock to environmental law enforcement capacity on bank management of risks arising from deforestation — a significant but understudied climate risk. After enforcement declined, Brazilian banks significantly altered their priorities to more short-term profitability over longer-term risk concerns. Banks greatly increased lending to agribusinesses engaged in deforestation and actively shifted ...
Working Papers , Paper 24-21

Working Paper
Did the 2017 Tax Reform Discriminate against Blue State Voters?
Altig, David E.; Auerbach, Alan J.; Higgins, Patrick C.; Koehler, Darryl; Kotlikoff, Laurence J.; Leiseca, Michael; Terry, Ellie; Ye, Victor (2019-04-01)
The Tax Cut and Jobs Act of 2017 (TCJA) made significant changes to corporate and personal federal income taxation, including limiting the SALT (state and local property, income and sales taxes) deductibility to $10,000. States with high SALT tend to vote Democratic. This paper estimates the differential effect of the TCJA on red- and blue-state taxpayers and investigates the importance of the SALT limitation to this differential. We calculate the effect of permanent implementation of the TCJA on households using The Fiscal Analyzer: a life-cycle, consumption-smoothing program incorporating ...
FRB Atlanta Working Paper , Paper 2019-7

Working Paper
Relieving Financial Distress Increases Voter Turnout: Evidence from the Mortgage Market
Liu, Haoyang; McCartney, W. Ben; Ramcharan, Rodney; Zhang, Calvin; Zhang, Xiaohan (2025-05-12)
Borrowers who refinanced mortgages between 2009 and 2012, a period marked by mortgage distress and dislocated housing markets, but also falling interest rates, were more likely to vote in the 2012 general election than similar borrowers who did not refinance. We exploit an eligibility cutoff in the Home Affordable Refinance Program (HARP) to identify a causal relationship. Consistent with the resource model of voting, the effect of refinancing on turnout is strongest among borrowers with lower incomes and larger debt service reductions. Our findings shed new light on an important channel ...
Working Papers , Paper 2517

Working Paper
Does Trade Liberalization with China Influence U.S. Elections?
Che, Yi; Tao, Zhigang; Lu, Yi; Schott, Peter K.; Pierce, Justin R. (2016-03)
This paper examines the impact of trade liberalization on U.S. Congressional elections. We find that U.S. counties subject to greater competition from China via a change in U.S. trade policy exhibit relative increases in turnout, the share of votes cast for Democrats and the probability that the county is represented by a Democrat. We find that these changes are consistent with Democrats in office being more likely than Republicans to support legislation limiting import competition or favoring economic assistance.
Finance and Economics Discussion Series , Paper 2016-039

Working Paper
Has income inequality or media fragmentation increased political polarization?
Saving, Jason L.; Duca, John V. (2012)
The increasing polarization of Congressional voting patterns has been attributed to factors including generational shifts, economic conditions, increased media fragmentation, and greater income inequality. The first of these factors is difficult to test with time series data owing to the low frequency of generational shifts, while the tendency of business cycles to reverse suggests that economic cycles are unable to account for long-term shifts in polarization. This leaves two main possible long-run drivers: the increasingly fragmented state of American media as stressed by Prior (2005, 2007) ...
Working Papers , Paper 1206

Working Paper
Expansionary Austerity: Reallocating Credit Amid Fiscal Consolidation
Morais, Bernardo; Peydró, José-Luis; Ruiz-Ortega, Claudia (2021-08-04)
We study the impact of public debt limits on economic growth exploiting the introduction of a Mexican law capping the debt of subnational governments. Despite larger fiscal consolidation, states with higher ex-ante public debt grew substantially faster after the law, albeit at the expense of increased extreme poverty. Credit registry data suggests that the mechanism behind this result is a reduction in crowding out. After the law, banks operating in more indebted states reallocate credit away from local governments and into private firms. The unwinding of crowding out is stronger for riskier ...
International Finance Discussion Papers , Paper 1323

Working Paper
Majority Voting in a Model of Means Testing
Glomm, Gerhard; Ravikumar, B.; Cardak, Buly A. (2018-06-01)
We study a model of endogenous means testing where households differ in their income and where the in-kind transfer received by each household declines with income. Majority voting determines the two dimensions of public policy: the size of the welfare program and the means-testing rate. We establish the existence of a sequential majority voting equilibrium and show that the means-testing rate increases with the size of the program but the fraction and the identity of the households receiving the transfers are independent of the program size. Furthermore, the set of subsidy recipients does ...
Working Papers , Paper 2018-14

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