Essays on empirical political economy and public policy

Abstract

This thesis is a collection of independent empirical essays in the field of political economy. The first chapter investigates the electoral effects of a local public good provision, using a local food subsidy program that took place in Turkey, 2019. Exploiting the variation in the geographical distances of voters to the food subsidy program groceries, I establish three results. First, the food subsidy program has a statistically significant positive effect on the incumbent vote share. Second, the effects of the program are conditional on partisanship. Although the effects of the incumbent vote share do not change across different partisan groups, the effects on turnout are heterogeneous and countervailing across partisans of incumbent and opposition party. Finally, I find that much of the electoral effects of the program come from areas where voters are uniformly partisans of either party rather than from areas with mixed partisan profiles. The second chapter investigates the evolution of class distinctiveness in economic preferences across countries and over time. To this end, I first develop a new measure of class distinctiveness by using predictive modeling. I then estimate this new measure for 18 European countries for three points in time using micro-level survey data. After validating the newly developed measure, I test whether the variation in the strength of class-based voting can be explained by the class distinctiveness in economic preferences. In the third chapter, co-authored with Nicole Stoelinga, we test whether hosting or bidding on the Olympic games leads to an increase in the exports of the host and bidding countries. Previous studies on this question provide mixed findings and typically suffer from empirical problems such as selection bias. We re-evaluate the problem by applying a synthetic control approach. Our results indicate that hosting or bidding on the Olympic Games may affect exports positively or negatively depending on the countries’ initial reputation in terms of trade.