Research

Policies are routinely evaluated based on criteria that are symmetric in individual incomes. We show that, when people have heterogeneous preferences over prices, there exists at most one Paretian ranking that is consistent with this symmetry property. We show that such a criterion exists in many canonical examples, but not in general. When the axioms are in conflict, our characterization gives rise to a family of social welfare criteria whose members correspond to different ways of relaxing the symmetry requirement. Under some assumptions, these criteria imply rankings of income distributions that can be estimated based on consumer expenditure data. We estimate that, given current expenditure patterns in the United States, these criteria rank income distributions approximately according to the sum of log incomes.

This paper provides field evidence on the link between morals and political behavior. We create a district-level variable that reflects to what degree charitable giving decreases as a function of (geographic and social) distance, which we interpret as a real-stakes measure of citizens' values on the universalism–particularism continuum. Our measure of district universalism is strongly predictive of local Democratic vote shares, legislators' roll call voting, and the moral content of congressional speeches. Spatial heterogeneity in universalism is a substantially stronger predictor of geographic variation in political outcomes than traditional economic variables such as income or education.

Quadratic funding is a public good provision mechanism that satisfies desirable theoretical properties, such as efficiency under complete information, and has been gaining popularity in practical applications. We evaluate this mechanism in a setting of incomplete information regarding individual preferences, and show that this result only holds under knife-edge conditions. We also estimate the inefficiency of the mechanism in a variety of settings, and characterize circumstances in which inefficiency increases with population size. We show how these findings can be used to estimate the mechanism's inefficiency in a wide range of situations under incomplete information.

We investigate whether luck is a relevant factor in election outcomes by analyzing how a country's change in terms of trade close to the election impacts the probability of reelection of the incumbent party. We draw from economic and political data on countries around the world and find that changes in the terms of trade one year before the election affect the reelection probability. Import prices are the main drivers of the result and elections in non-OECD countries are the most affected by terms of trade.