DPIR’s Katerina Tertytchnaya scoops two APSA Awards for book and paper
DPIR's Neil Ketchley wins two APSA awards
Meet Olga Onuch
The issue of students using AI in examinations
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Who Gets Protection from Protectionism? Evidence from the Buy American Act
Contemporary protectionist policies in the U.S. are often initiated by the executive branch but enforced unevenly across firms. We argue that such uneven enforcement arises because legislators—with both institutional capacity and local motivation—shield connected firms from executive protectionist measures. We test this claim using the Trump administration’s Buy American Act (BAA), which penalized firms reliant on foreign, especially Chinese, suppliers. Combining firm-level data on federal contracts, supply chains, and campaign contributions, we analyze 1,958 firms (2015–2019).
Regime Loyalty during Wartime: Evidence from Nazi Germany
Measuring regime support in closed autocracies is notoriously challenging due to preference falsification, state censorship, and pervasive propaganda. We introduce a novel behavioral measure of regime loyalty based on subtle expressions of allegiance in soldier obituaries published in Nazi Germany between 1939 and 1945. Our empirical analysis draws on a large-scale dataset of over one million scanned pages from roughly 160,000 newspaper issues across 260 unique local news outlets.
How Incumbent Mayors Affect Democratic Governance: Incumbency, Education, and Kinship Ties in Municipal Councils
Musical Chairs: How Frequent Judge Transfers Shape Judicial Decision-Making in India (with Saloni Bhogale, Amit Jadhav)
In many parts of the world, judges are reassigned or transferred frequently. We argue that transfers undermine court productivity and cause judges to prioritize easier and recently filed cases. We test these propositions using big data from the courts of first instance in India, in which there are more than 40 million cases pending, and a research design that leverages transfers due to judge retirements at precisely age 60. The data suggest that judge transfers are frequent, occurring once every 10 months.