Work in progress
"US go home! Local economic impact of foreign military bases" (with Abel François)
Abstract: This paper examines the impact of foreign military bases on the local economy. Leveraging exogenous NATO base closures in France after President Charles de Gaulle’s 1966 decision to withdraw from NATO’s integrated military command, we evaluate the short- and long-run effects of this demand shock on dynamics of population growth. Using a panel of 34,473 municipalities, we combine a difference-in-differences approach with propensity score matching to exploit spatial variation in base closures and estimate their effect on population growth in affected municipalities. Our results indicate that municipalities within 35 km of a base experienced a 0.3 percentage point decrease in annual population growth over the 30 years following closure, suggesting that negative demand shocks can have persistent effects on local economies. This result is robust to tests for parallel trends, doubly-robust estimators, spatial spillovers, spatial correlation of standard errors and alternative buffer sizes. Heterogeneity analyses reveal stronger effects in smaller municipalities and for closures of Royal Canadian Air Force bases, while short-run declines are primarily driven by the closure of bases that hosted larger numbers of troops.
"Does strategic voting payoff? Evidence from the US Senate, 1911-2013"
Abstract: It is often assumed that politicians act strategically to further their political careers, but little is known of the effectiveness of such strategies. In the U.S. Senate, roll calls are held in alphabetical order, which induces patterns of strategic voting. This paper exploits the quasi-experimental setting of the US Senate to estimate the impact of strategic voting on the election outcomes of incumbent senators. Using an instrumental variable strategy where the probability of senators deviating from the party line on roll call votes is instrumented by their relative position in the alphabetical order, this paper examines whether strategic deviations impact the probability of re-election of incumbent senators. The results indicate that on average, strategic deviations have a large negative effect on senators’ chances of re-election. These effects are however predominantly driven by minority party senators, who put their party at greater risk when deviating. Conversely, majority party senators increased their re-election probability through strategic deviations. Adjusting for selection into candidacy, I document a positive effect of strategically deviating on re-election unconditional on running.