Francesco Trebbi
Biographic Data
| ID | 5806430 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Francesco Trebbi |
| GIVEN NAMES | Francesco |
| FAMILY NAME | Trebbi |
| SIGNATURE | TREBBI F |
| AFFILIATIONS | Harvard University |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 14 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 15 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 14 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2002 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Making Policies Matter
Can voters in clientelist countries be swayed by programmatic promises? Results from a structural model and a field experiment disseminating candidate policy platforms in Philippine mayoral elections indicate that they can. Voters who received information about candidate policy promises were more likely to vote for candidates who were closer to their own preferences. Voters who were informed about incumbent candidates’ past commitments were more …
Lobbying Behind the Frontier
How Is Power Shared in Africa?
Is African politics characterized by concentrated power in the hands of a narrow group (ethnically determined) that then fluctuates from one extreme to another via frequent coups? Employing data on the ethnicity of cabinet ministers since independence, we show that African ruling coalitions are surprisingly large and that political power is allocated proportionally to population shares across ethnic groups. This holds true even restricting the an…
How Do Voters Respond to Information? Evidence from a Randomized Campaign
In a large-scale controlled trial in collaboration with the reelection campaign of an Italian incumbent mayor, we administered (randomized) messages about the candidate's valence or ideology. Informational treatments affected both actual votes in the precincts and individual vote declarations. Campaigning on valence brought more votes to the incumbent, but both messages affected voters' beliefs. Cross-learning occurred, as voters who received inf…
Is It Whom You Know or What You Know? An Empirical Assessment of the Lobbying Process
Do lobbyists provide issue-specific information to members of Congress? Or do they provide special interests access to politicians? We present evidence to assess the role of issue expertise versus connections in the US Federal lobbying process and illustrate how both are at work. In support of the connections view, we show that lobbyists follow politicians they were initially connected to when those politicians switch to new committee assignments…
The Political Economy of the Subprime Mortgage Credit Expansion
We examine how special interests, measured by campaign contributions from the mortgage industry, and constituent interests, measured by the share of subprime borrowers in a congressional district, may have influenced U.S. government policy toward subprime mortgage credit expansion from 2002 to 2007. Beginning in 2002, mortgage industry campaign contributions increasingly targeted U.S. representatives from districts with a large fraction of subpri…
Democracy, Technology, and Growth
Book description: \nInstitutions and Economic Performance explores the question of why income per capita varies so greatly across countries. Even taking into account disparities in resources, including physical and human capital, large economic discrepancies remain across countries. Why are some societies but not others able to encourage investments in places, people, and productivity? \n \nThe answer, the book argues, lies to a large extent in i…
Choosing Electoral Rules
Endogenous Political Institutions
A fundamental aspect of institutional design is how much society chooses to delegate unchecked power to its leaders. If, once elected, a leader cannot be restrained, society runs the risk of a tyranny of the majority, if not the tyranny of a dictator. If a leader faces too many ex post checks and balances, legislative action is too often blocked. As our critical constitutional choice, we focus upon the size of the minority needed to block legisla…
Institutions Rule
Electoral Rules and Corruption
Is corruption systematically related to electoral rules? A number of studies have tried to uncover economic and social determinants of corruption but, as far as we know, nobody has yet empirically investigated how electoral systems influence corruption. We try to address this lacuna in the literature, by relating corruption to different features of the electoral system in a sample from the late nineties encompassing more than 80 (developed and de…
Retrospectives
The instrumental variables estimator first appeared explicitly in Appendix B of The Tariff on Animal and Vegetable Oils by Philip G. Wright (1928). It has been suggested that this appendix was written by Philip's son Sewall Wright, then already an important genetic statistician. To find out who wrote Appendix B, we use stylometric statistics to compare it to other texts known to have been written solely by the father and son. The sharp results ar…
Institutions Rule
We estimate the respective contributions of institutions, geography, and trade in determining income levels around the world, using recently developed instruments for institutions and trade. Our results indicate that the quality of institutions "trumps" everything else. Once institutions are controlled for, measures of geography have at best weak direct effects on incomes, although they have a strong indirect effect by influencing the quality of …
Endogenous Political Institutions
The Political Economy of the Subprime Mortgage Credit Expansion
We examine how special interests, measured by campaign contributions from the mortgage industry, and constituent interests, measured by the share of subprime borrowers in a congressional district, may have influenced U.S. government policy toward subprime mortgage credit expansion from 2002 to 2007. Beginning in 2002, mortgage industry campaign contributions increasingly targeted U.S. representatives from districts with a large fraction of subpri…
Making Policies Matter
Can voters in clientelist countries be swayed by programmatic promises? Results from a structural model and a field experiment disseminating candidate policy platforms in Philippine mayoral elections indicate that they can. Voters who received information about candidate policy promises were more likely to vote for candidates who were closer to their own preferences. Voters who were informed about incumbent candidates’ past commitments were more …
Institutions Rule
We estimate the respective contributions of institutions, geography, and trade in determining income levels around the world, using recently developed instruments for institutions and trade. Our results indicate that the quality of institutions "trumps" everything else. Once institutions are controlled for, measures of geography have at best weak direct effects on incomes, although they have a strong indirect effect by influencing the quality of …
Endogenous Political Institutions
Electoral Rules and Corruption
Is corruption systematically related to electoral rules? A number of studies have tried to uncover economic and social determinants of corruption but, as far as we know, nobody has yet empirically investigated how electoral systems influence corruption. We try to address this lacuna in the literature, by relating corruption to different features of the electoral system in a sample from the late nineties encompassing more than 80 (developed and de…
Retrospectives
The instrumental variables estimator first appeared explicitly in Appendix B of The Tariff on Animal and Vegetable Oils by Philip G. Wright (1928). It has been suggested that this appendix was written by Philip's son Sewall Wright, then already an important genetic statistician. To find out who wrote Appendix B, we use stylometric statistics to compare it to other texts known to have been written solely by the father and son. The sharp results ar…
Endogenous Political Institutions
A fundamental aspect of institutional design is how much society chooses to delegate unchecked power to its leaders. If, once elected, a leader cannot be restrained, society runs the risk of a tyranny of the majority, if not the tyranny of a dictator. If a leader faces too many ex post checks and balances, legislative action is too often blocked. As our critical constitutional choice, we focus upon the size of the minority needed to block legisla…
Institutions Rule
Choosing Electoral Rules
Democracy, Technology, and Growth
Book description: \nInstitutions and Economic Performance explores the question of why income per capita varies so greatly across countries. Even taking into account disparities in resources, including physical and human capital, large economic discrepancies remain across countries. Why are some societies but not others able to encourage investments in places, people, and productivity? \n \nThe answer, the book argues, lies to a large extent in i…
The Political Economy of the Subprime Mortgage Credit Expansion
We examine how special interests, measured by campaign contributions from the mortgage industry, and constituent interests, measured by the share of subprime borrowers in a congressional district, may have influenced U.S. government policy toward subprime mortgage credit expansion from 2002 to 2007. Beginning in 2002, mortgage industry campaign contributions increasingly targeted U.S. representatives from districts with a large fraction of subpri…
Is It Whom You Know or What You Know? An Empirical Assessment of the Lobbying Process
Do lobbyists provide issue-specific information to members of Congress? Or do they provide special interests access to politicians? We present evidence to assess the role of issue expertise versus connections in the US Federal lobbying process and illustrate how both are at work. In support of the connections view, we show that lobbyists follow politicians they were initially connected to when those politicians switch to new committee assignments…
How Is Power Shared in Africa?
Is African politics characterized by concentrated power in the hands of a narrow group (ethnically determined) that then fluctuates from one extreme to another via frequent coups? Employing data on the ethnicity of cabinet ministers since independence, we show that African ruling coalitions are surprisingly large and that political power is allocated proportionally to population shares across ethnic groups. This holds true even restricting the an…
How Do Voters Respond to Information? Evidence from a Randomized Campaign
In a large-scale controlled trial in collaboration with the reelection campaign of an Italian incumbent mayor, we administered (randomized) messages about the candidate's valence or ideology. Informational treatments affected both actual votes in the precincts and individual vote declarations. Campaigning on valence brought more votes to the incumbent, but both messages affected voters' beliefs. Cross-learning occurred, as voters who received inf…
Lobbying Behind the Frontier
Making Policies Matter
Can voters in clientelist countries be swayed by programmatic promises? Results from a structural model and a field experiment disseminating candidate policy platforms in Philippine mayoral elections indicate that they can. Voters who received information about candidate policy promises were more likely to vote for candidates who were closer to their own preferences. Voters who were informed about incumbent candidates’ past commitments were more …
Economics (12 works) · Political science (11 works) · Law (8 works) · Politics (7 works) · Electoral Systems and Political Participation (5 works) · Culture, Economy, and Development Studies (4 works) · Economic Policies and Impacts (4 works) · Fiscal Policies and Political Economy (4 works) · Public economics (4 works) · Corruption and Economic Development (3 works)