Research

A large literature suggests that U.S. politicians are active participants in geographically targeting funds to their district. However, the motivations for politicians to pursue pork-barrel spending have not been tested empirically. In this paper I use redistricting announcements as a natural experiment to test if politicians respond to changes in electoral incentives. During redistricting, congressional representatives learn mid-term what their new district will look like in the subsequent election, creating differential incentives for targeting within their current district. After learning their new district's boundaries, a representative who uses pork to help win re-election no longer has an incentive to target pork to places within their district that they will no longer seek to represent in the future. I find that following a redistricting announcement is made, areas that remain in their district receive $1.15-$1.80 in federal project grants per-capita (30% of mean per-capita project grants) more than areas that will be redistricted, quantifying the degree to which members of Congress are forward-looking.

I estimate the impact of majority political party representation on the distribution of intergovernmental funds using a regression discontinuity design. I use state elections instead of federal elections, which allow for testing heterogenous effects of majority party affiliation with government unification. The results suggest that the distinction between divided and unified governments is a crucial component to local distributive politics. I find effects ranging from increases of 1.2% to 3.7%, with the largest effects occurring when a representative is affiliated with the political party of a unified government. There is no impact found when the government is divided.

We estimate the impact of a political party’s legal ability to unilaterally redistrict Congressional seats upon partisan seat share allocations in the U.S. House of Representatives. Controlling for state X decade and year effects, we find an 8.2 percentage point increase in the Republican House seat share in the three elections following Republican control over redistricting in the past two decades. We find no significant or sizable effect for Democrats. The effects over the past five decades in aggregate are smaller and insignificant for both parties. In the past two decades, these effects are sizable though not pivotal for Congressional control.

Economic analysis of effective policies for managing epidemics requires an integrated economic and epidemiological approach. We develop and estimate a spatial, micro-founded model of the joint evolution of economic variables and the spread of an epidemic. We empirically discipline the model using new U.S. county-level data on health, mobility, employment outcomes, and non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) at a daily frequency. Absent policy or medical interventions, the model predicts an initial period of exponential growth in new cases, followed by a protracted period of roughly constant case levels and reduced economic activity. Nevertheless, if vaccine development proved impossible, and suppression cannot entirely eradicate the disease, a utilitarian policymaker cannot improve significantly over the laissez-faire equilibrium by using lockdowns. Conversely, if a vaccine will arrive within two years, NPIs can improve upon the laissez-faire outcome by dramatically decreasing the number of infectious agents and keeping infections low until vaccine arrival. Mitigation measures that reduce viral transmission (e.g., mask-wearing) both reduce the virus's spread and increase economic activity.