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We focus on changes in technology and campaign management to study the documented simultaneous increase in campaign spending and polarization. In our model, some voters are ideological while others are impressionable. If the distribution of voters between types is endogenous and depends on parties' platform choices, our results show that a) an increase in the effectiveness of electoral advertising or a decrease in the electorate's political awareness, surely increases polarization and may also increase campaign spending, while b) a decrease in the cost of advertising does not affect neither polarization nor spending.

We show how an institutional provision designed to increase accountability of local legislature officials can lead to a distribution of power within the legislature which is not consistent with voters' true preferences. The cause of this inconsistency is the ballot design which asymmetrically affects the officials listed on it. We analyze the case of the Lima's 2013 city legislature recall referendum and show that, controlling for the legislators' individual characteristics, the design of the referendum ballot had adverse and significant effects on the composition of the Lima's city legislature, and examine the counterfactuals of different ballot designs. We show that the election results with more "neutral" ballot designs would have been significantly different, and the composition of the new council would have been more representative of voters' preferences.

We show that monitoring by individuals with preferences regarding the outcome of the supervised task interferes with the task's process: the monitors bias the results in favor of their own preferences. In particular, using an original dataset from the 2011 national elections in Argentina, we exploit a (quasi) natural experiment to show that electoral observers with partisan preferences cause a 1.7% to 7% increase in the vote count of the observers' preferred party. This bias, which appears under various electoral rules, concentrates in municipalities with lower civic capital (Guiso et al. (2010)) and weakens the accountability role of elections.

We show that monitoring by individuals with preferences regarding the outcome of the supervised task interferes with the task's process: the monitors bias the results in favor of their own preferences. In particular, using an original dataset from the 2011 national elections in Argentina, we exploit a (quasi) natural experiment to show that electoral observers with partisan preferences cause a 1.7% to 7% increase in the vote count of the observers' preferred party. This bias, which appears under various electoral rules, concentrates in municipalities with lower civic capital (Guiso et al. (2010)) and weakens the accountability role of elections. Casas gratefully acknowledges the financial help of the Spanish Ministry of the Economy and Competitiveness under grant ECO2012-34581, and Diaz gratefully acknowledges the help from the Centro de Investigacion de la Universidad del Pacifico, for partially funding the database construction.

Using the daily trade of futures from the prediction markets site Intrade, we pin down the effect of printed newspapers endorsements (announcement of an explicit support for a political candidate) on the candidates' likelihood of winning. It is established that unexpected endorsements have a large impact on voters' behavior. However, we show that this effect is only true when the endorsement is a coherent one: if a newspaper that praises conservative (liberal) policies endorses a candidate with liberal (conservative) ideas, the endorsement does not impact the candidate's probability of winning, as it is regarded as incoherent. Our measure for coherence comes from Gentzkow and Shapiro (2005), but we also use Ansolabehere and Snyder (2004)'s \propensity to endorse Democrats" to show that a surprise endorsement has a large and potentially tipping effect in a tied contest

Using the daily trade of futures from the prediction markets site Intrade, we pin down the effect of printed newspapers endorsements (announcement of an explicit support for a political candidate) on the candidates' likelihood of winning. It is established that unexpected endorsements have a large impact on voters' behavior. However, we show that this effect is only true when the endorsement is a coherent one: if a newspaper that praises conservative (liberal) policies endorses a candidate with liberal (conservative) ideas, the endorsement does not impact the candidate's probability of winning, as it is regarded as incoherent. Our measure for coherence comes from Gentzkow and Shapiro (2005), but we also use Ansolabehere and Snyder (2004)'s \propensity to endorse Democrats" to show that a surprise endorsement has a large and potentially tipping effect in a tied contest

Parties' candidates are chosen by different nomination rules. Recent empirical evidence shows that these rules influence the attributes of the nominees; for instance, open primaries in the U.S. choose more extreme candidates than closed primaries. Despite this evidence, the literature does not provide an explanation of why appealing to a more moderate electorate -as during open primariesresults in more extreme candidates. I build a model that shows that open primaries elect \predictable extremists", while, for instance, party leaders would chose \moderate mavericks". I obtain these results through a model that puts together 3 pieces of partisan politics: affiliation decisions, nomination rules, and an observed endogenous valence, which (together with party membership) signals the candidates' ideologies. Moreover, I investigate the welfare implications of three methods: nomination by the party leader, by closed primaries, and by open primaries. I show the conditions under which nomination by party leaders leads to higher social welfare than nomination by open primaries. Furthermore, I show that higher screening by parties, leads to more ideologically uncertain candidates. In sum, I argue that party affiliation decisions, and endogenous valence play a large role in understanding the effects of nomination rules on the political equilibria.

In 2007, based on medical reports, FIFA ruled that no international football competition could be played in stadiums with an altitude higher than 2500 meters. We provide stark evidence which supports the claim that playing in high altitude benefits the home team through two channels. First, in these scenarios, high altitude teams (HAT) do better against low altitude teams than against other high altitude teams. Second, every time that low altitude teams visit other high altitude teams they get fewer points than if they had played in a low altitude stadium. Therefore, the HAT go up in the ranking of the southamerican qualifiers for world cups, not only because of their own extra-advantage of playing in high altitudes, but also because the LAT do worse in all high altitude stadiums. According to our work, have this ruling taken effect, Ecuador would not have gone to the 2006 world cup, and therefore Ecuador's Football Federation would have lost at least 40 million dollars given out by FIFA to all teams going to the world cup.

In this paper, I model the relationship between potential voters and a politician, who can pay citizens to vote for him – vote buying – or to show up to vote – turnout buying. This model is used to explore the optimal budget allocation across districts, focusing on single-member majoritarian elections in a multi-district environment in which only the incumbent can engage in vote and turnout buying. The results enrich the distributive politics literature by showing that a campaign with direct voting is optimally focused on the opposition strongholds, rather than on swing or core states. I need strong evidence for this result using Argentinian electoral data disaggregated at the booth level, and spending data from a poverty relief program. I show that in the month prior to the 2003 Argentine presidential election, the incumbent party spent more money on groups that were ideologically skewed toward the opposition. Consequently, those districts turned out more, and voted more for the incumbent, who had transferred the money. Furthermore, to isolate actual campaign spending from campaign promises, I use Argentina's 2001 economic and political turmoil as a natural experiment. The empirical evidence confirms that in a single-member district election without an electoral college the incumbent candidate allocates more resources where the marginal cost per vote is lower, that is, in opposition strongholds.