Research

In this paper, I examine the relationship between personal wealth and electoral competition within the U.S. Congress. Drawing on data from 1980 to 2018, I explore how wealth disparities among incumbents influence their campaign strategies, electoral success, and ability to deter challengers. My analysis demonstrates that wealthier incumbents consistently raise and spend more money, frequently self-finance their campaigns, and enjoy higher vote shares compared to their less-wealthy peers. Institutional factors and district characteristics influence wealth’s impact on elections, and money alone does not guarantee political success. Yet, my findings suggest an increasing role of personal wealth in congressional elections with potential implications for representation in Congress.

How crucial is a lawmaker’s committee assignment for the advancement of her proposed bills through the legislative process? We leverage incidents of committee exile, meaning the involuntary removal from a committee by a committee member after her party suffers significant electoral losses, to explore whether legislators are more or less successful at advancing their agenda items, depending on the committees on which they serve. Our analysis reveals that exiled lawmakers are significantly less successful at advancing their policy agendas in subsequent Congresses than their closest non-exiled co-partisans, effects that slowly fade over succeeding Congresses. Moreover, those exiled from specific committees perform much worse on the issue areas that serve as the focus of those committees. Hence, it appears that being exiled from a committee can have lasting consequences for a legislator’s trajectory as an effective lawmaker and the issue areas on which she experiences the greatest success. More broadly considered, our findings suggest that a legislator’s committee assignments do indeed have a profound influence over her effectiveness as a lawmaker.

This study investigates the effect of broadband internet on healthcare policy participation, specifically focusing on the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and its implementation in 2014. To isolate the causal effect of broadband on policy uptake of the ACA, the research design employs fixed effects modeling to compare the within-county changes in uninsured rates for counties that did and did not expand broadband access. This research reveals that the uninsured rate declined most sharply in counties that expanded broadband internet after full implementation of the ACA. Moreover, the effects of broadband expansion on reducing the uninsured rate are most pronounced in counties that expanded Medicaid and in counties that had the lowest political support for the Obama Administration. These findings challenge conventional wisdom and highlight the intricate relationship between technology, politics, and policy engagement prevalent in the digital age.

Employers face persistent information asymmetries when assessing worker productivity and commitment. While education serves as a costly signal of ability, rising student debt and shifting retention incentives complicate this dynamic. This paper develops a two-stage game-theoretic model integrating education, experience, and debt into a unified signaling–retention framework. In the first stage, workers choose whether to acquire a degree as a pre-hire signal; in the second, retention becomes an endogenous decision in a repeated employment game. Debt amplifies the cost of education and shapes post-hire turnover by influencing outside options and discount rates. The model shows that debt strengthens separating equilibria by deterring low-ability mimicking, but also reduces retention by encouraging early job switching. Comparative statics highlight how shocks such as loan forgiveness elimination or public-sector layoffs destabilize equilibria and shift retention patterns. The results contribute to signaling and labor market theory with implications for employer strategy and higher education policy.