An extensive literature argues that social capital facilitates political participation. This paper contributes to the literature on the political consequences of social capital by studying the effect of elite club membership on political office holding. We argue that elite social clubs foster strong social connections that allow members to…

We experimentally study an environment where a group of senders communicates with a receiver by disclosing or not disclosing a realized outcome. Group members have distinct preferences over disclosure/non-disclosure, and aggregate their interests into a collective disclosure decision via a given deliberation procedure. In line with theoretical…

We analyze a game-theoretic model of crime and crime reporting to study the quality of crime statistics. A citizen potentially engages in illicit behavior; an enforcement agency chooses effort and how to report outcomes. Because of signaling concerns, the agency may misreport. We show that multiple equilibria can exist and characterize when…

We study the optimal incentives provision in non-stationary, long-term projects. A project’s progress is modeled by a Brownian motion that must hit a target level for completion. An agent has CARA preferences, can privately save and borrow, and exerts hidden effort to increase the process’s drift. Thanks to the absence of wealth effects, the…

This paper measures potential inefficiency in California's drinking water infrastructure and investigates its causes and welfare consequences, drawing on a novel dataset that integrates drinking water investments, system performance, local politics, and housing market.  Using eligibility thresholds for federal funds, we demonstrate that…

Using a novel dataset covering the complete history of individual-level web traffic and digital subscriptions from a major metropolitan newspaper in the United States from 2020 to 2023, we investigate consumers' willingness to pay for different categories of news content, with particular focus on the kinds of coverage believed to generate civic…

Can voting technology improve the integrity of elections in developing democracies? We study this question in the context of Bulgaria’s transition from paper ballots to machine voting -- a measure introduced with the goal of improving the accuracy of the election process and disrupting established practices of vote-buying and voter coercion…

We consider a team production environment augmented by a stage in which the team decides how to communicate its productive outcome to outside observers. In this context, we characterize equilibrium disclosure of team outcomes when team disclosure choices aggregate individual recommendations through some deliberation procedure. We show that…

The U.S. has one of the highest incarceration rates in the world, with over seven million individuals admitted to jails each year. These incarcerated individuals are the only group in the U.S. that have a constitutional right to receiving "reasonably adequate" health care. Yet, there is little oversight and funding for health care in jails,…