This paper studies the political economy of fertility. Specifically, I argue that fertility may be a strategic choice for ethnic groups engaged in redistributive conflict. I first present a simple conflict model where high fertility is optimal for each ethnic group if and only if the economy’s ethnic diversity is high and/or institutions are weak. I then test the model in a cross-national datas...

Decision making often entails conflict. In many situations, the symptoms of such decisional conflict are conspicuous. This article explores an important and unexamined question: How does observing someone else experiencing decisional conflict impact our own preferences? The authors show that observing others’ emotional conflict and agony over an impending decision makes the observer’s preferenc...

Through an analysis of information systems in medical communities – notably the development of the International Classification of Diseases and the design of a Nursing Interventions Classification scheme – we argue that community systems designers necessarily build for multiple social worlds simultaneously. So doing, we argue, they make a series of significant social and political choices. We d...

This study investigates hedge funds equity ownership in light of the COVID-19 pandemic. Using merged dataset Lipper TASS and corresponding 13F filings, we find that with start pandemic, increased their toward firms less financial constraints, such as larger firms, lower leverage, more profitability. Moreover, which had higher overall risk (political non-political), sentiment. Hedge also care ab...

Individual differences in disgust sensitivity have been linked to social attitudes and ideology, but the generalizability of this effect and the nature of the political issues implicated remain unclear. In two studies using large Dutch samples, we find that disgust sensitivity predicts political attitudes for issues in several domains related to physical/spiritual purity and pathogen risk. Sens...

We studied a male with acquired prosopagnosia using a battery of Implicit Association Tests (IATs) to investigate whether observing faces varying by social category would activate the patient's implicit social biases. We also asked him to categorize faces explicitly by race, gender, and political party. The patient, G.B., was marginally slower to categorize black compared to white faces. He sho...

This paper revisits the impact of electoral accountability on total state expenditure and tax revenue with panel data from the 48 continental U.S. states from 1950 to 1999. Besides examining “traditional” tests of sensitivity, we present estimates from a difference-in-differences propensity score matching model (DD PSM) and a parametric difference-in-differences-in-differences approach (DDD) th...

Physiological research suggests that social attitudes, such as political beliefs, may be partly hard-wired in the brain. Conservatives have heightened sensitivity for detecting emotional faces and use emotion more effectively when campaigning. As the left face displays emotion more prominently, we examined 1538 official photographs of conservative and liberal politicians from Australia, Canada,...

Politico-Economic Causes of Labor Regulation in the United States: Rent Seeking, Alliances, Raising Rivals’ Costs (Even Lowering One’s Own?), and Interjurisdictional Competition This paper offers an eclectic survey of the political economy of labor regulation in the United States at federal and state levels along the dimensions of occupational health and safety, unjust dismissal, right-to-work,...