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Do political leaders pursue their own parochial interests? Does the economic background of those in power affect the economy? Estimating the impact of leaders' interests without bias is difficult given the nonrandom nature of transitions between leaders in most regimes. This article exploits a selection mechanism in the Florentine Republic that combines features of election and lottery to evaluate the causal impact of leaders' economic interests. Coupling high-frequency data on the trading value of the Florentine currency with data on the guild association of each leader, I show that the export orientation of the Florentine executive, the standard-bearer of justice, had a large effect on the value of the city's currency, the florin. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Political scientists frequently interpret the results of conjoint experiments as reflective of majority preferences. In this article, we show that the target estimand of conjoint experiments, the average marginal component effect (AMCE), is not well defined in these terms. Even with individually rational experimental subjects, the AMCE can indicate the opposite of the true preference of the majority. To show this, we characterize the preference aggregation rule implied by the AMCE and demonstrate its several undesirable properties. With this result, we provide a method for placing bounds on the proportion of experimental subjects who prefer a given candidate feature. We describe conditions under which the AMCE corresponds in sign with the majority preference. Finally, we offer a structural interpretation of the AMCE and highlight that the problem we describe persists even when a model of voting is imposed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we examine the impact of natural resource wealth by focusing on historical coal-mining across European regions. As an exogenous source of variation in coal extraction activities, we rely on the presence of coal-deposits located on the earth's surface, which historically facilitated the discovery and extraction of coal. Our results show that former coal-mining regions are substantially poorer, with (at least) 10% smaller per-capita GDP than comparable regions in the same country that did not mine coal. We provide evidence that much of this lag is explained by lower levels of human capital accumulation and that this human-capital effect is concentrated in men. Finally, we provide suggestive evidence that the persistently lower levels of human capital in coal mining regions that we document result from the crystallization of negative attitudes towards education and lower future orientations in these regions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We develop and estimate a model of learning that accounts for the observed correlation between economic development and democracy and for the clustering of democratization events. In our model, countries' own and neighbors' past experiences shape elites' beliefs about the effects of democracy on economic growth and their likelihood of retaining power. These beliefs influence the choice to transition into or out of democracy. We show that learning is crucial to explaining observed transitions since the mid-twentieth century. Moreover, our model predicts reversals to authoritarianism if the world experienced a growth shock the size of the Great Depression. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A large body of scholarship places considerable weight on the role that national constitutions play in promoting order and development. To what degree are these institutions fixed "rules of the game" or fluid outcomes, responsive to changes in underlying primitives? In this paper, we develop a dynamic measure of constitutional similarity to show that the typical national constitution is hardly fixed. We find, in contrast, evidence of a large degree of fluidity and change: over one-third of all variation in constitution writing is driven by within-country changes. We then investigate broad trends in constitution writing and find that across the twentieth century there has been a convergence in constitutional forms of government. Finally, we provide evidence that this trend has been toward documents that contain diffuse centers of power and numerous well-defined, positive, rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Given the abundance of evidence that disputed territory matters, we know remarkably little about the origins of territorial claims. We argue that the presence of competing historical border precedents is central to the emergence of territorial claims. We outline why precedents provide opportunity to make claims and provide two possible explanations for why leaders have incentive to claim along precedents. One possibility is consistent with the conventional wisdom that incentive derives from territorial characteristics such as natural resources or strategic significance. A second and more novel explanation is that the persistent coordination effects of historical boundaries provide the incentive to draw claims along them. We use new data on the location of historical boundaries from the peace of Westphalia until the start of the French Revolution to show that historical border precedents drive the emergence of territorial claims after the Congress of Vienna and that persistent coordination effects provide incentive to dispute historical precedents. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]