Abstract:
In multiparty parliamentary democracies government coalitions frequently
reshuffle the allocation of cabinet posts, and cabinets terminate before the
end of the legislature. I interpret these events as equilibrium outcomes of a
strategic interaction among political parties. Parties' incentives to terminate
the government and seek early elections depend on future electoral prospects,
and electoral opinion polls convey information regarding possible shifts in the
electoral support. I develop a dynamic strategic model of government formation
and termination, and structurally estimate the model using newly collected data
on eleven Western European parliamentary democracies over the period 1970-2002.
Using the estimated model I conduct counterfactual experiments aimed at
evaluating the effects of poll informativeness and institutional features on
the survival probabilities of coalition governments.
Abstract:
Using a newly collected data set covering sixty-two countries over the period
1945-2006, we construct a number of measures of political tenure and we
document a robust negative (positive) effect of political tenure on the size of
government surplus (expenditure). We also provide a theoretical model that
accounts for the established facts.
Abstract: Why is negative advertising such
a prominent feature of competition in the US political market? The typical
election in the United States is a two-candidate race. This duopolistic competition
provides stronger incentives for "going negative" relative to
non-duopoly contests: when the number of competitors is greater than two,
engaging in negative ads creates positive externalities for opponents that are
not the object of the attack. In contrast, positive ads benefit only the advertiser.
To investigate the empirical relevance of the "fewness" of competitors
in explaining the volume of negative advertising, we collected information
about all candidates running for a US non-presidential primary contest in 2004
and 2008. The nature of primaries provides us with a cross section of
independent races and large variation in the number of entrants. We merge these
data with specific information on the political advertisements aired during the
campaigns from the Wisconsin Advertising Project. The findings are striking:
duopolies are twice as likely to air a negative ad when compared to non-duopolies,
and doubling the number of competitors drives the rate of negative advertising
in an election close to zero. The estimates are robust to various specification
checks and
the inclusion of potential confounding
factors at the race, candidate and ad levels.
Abstract: Eating disorders are an important and growing health concern, and
bulimia nervosa (BN) accounts for the largest fraction of eating disorders
(ED). Health consequences of BN are substantial and especially serious given
the increasingly compulsive nature of the disorder. However, remarkably little
is known about the mechanisms underlying the persistent nature of BN. Using a
unique panel data set on young women and instrumental variable techniques, we
document that unobserved heterogeneity plays a role in the persistence of BN,
but strikingly up to two thirds is due to true state dependence. Our results,
together with support from the medical literature, provide evidence that
bulimia should be considered an addiction. Our findings have important
implications for public policy since they suggest that the timing of the policy
is crucial: preventive educational programs should be coupled with more intense
(rehabilitation) treatment at the early stages of bingeing and purging
behaviors. Our results are robust to different model specifications and
identifying assumptions.
Selected Press Reactions: Chicago-Sun Times; Guardian; Science Update (radio feature for Science); Teen Vogue; USC news release; PBS Tavis Smiley
Abstract: In this paper we explore a serious eating disorder, bulimia
nervosa (BN), which afflicts a surprising number of girls in the US. We
challenge the long-held belief that BN primarily affects affluent White
teenagers, using a unique data set on adolescent females evaluated regarding
their tendencies towards bulimic behaviors independent of any diagnoses or
treatment they have received. Our results reveal that African Americans are
more likely to exhibit bulimic behavior than Whites; as are girls from low
income families compared to middle and high income families. The fact that our
results stand in stark contrast to the popular conceptions of who is most
likely to struggle with bulimia may arise from differences in diagnosis across racial
and income classes. Our findings have important implications for public policy
since they provide direction to policy makers regarding which adolescent
females are most at risk for BN. Our results are robust to different model
specifications and identifying assumptions.
Selected Press Reactions: Chicago-Sun Times; Guardian; Science Update (radio feature for Science); Teen Vogue; USC news release; PBS Tavis Smiley
Abstract: We study the relationship between
education and individual HIV status using nationally representative data
(Demographic and Health Surveys, DHS) for 18 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa
(SSA). Because the diffusion of knowledge on HIV prevention- hence, actual
change in sexual behavior - may differ across education groups, we explicitly
explore the possibility of a dynamic relationship between education and the
probability of being infected with HIV over aggregate stages of the HIV
epidemic. Our contribution is twofold. First, we construct an innovative
algorithm that positions, for any set of countries, the country-specific
evolution of the HIV epidemic in a unified framework - a normalized
epidemiological space- to define stages of the HIV epidemic in a comparable
manner across SSA countries. Second, using this framework, we exploit epidemiological
stage variation across DHS countries and find that the relationship between
education and individual HIV status is dynamic and significantly evolves with
the course of the epidemic. Specifically, we show that the education gradient
of HIV displays a large U-shaped (positive-zero- positive) pattern over the
aggregate stages of the HIV epidemic.