1 . 2 Sequential Elections

My research lies at the intersection of the elds of political economy, public economics, and applied econometrics. In recent decades, a vibrant literature in political economy has developed game theoretical models of the political process and has examined the role of various economic and political factors in the endogenous determination of policies. This theoretical literature, however, has in many cases outpaced empirical research in this area, and the link between the theoretical and empirical literatures has often been weak. Moreover, this political economy literature has often not been well connected to empirical research in the eld of public economics, which has often ignored the potential endogeneity of policies. In short, my research agenda aims to bridge these gaps by using theoretical models of the political process in order to provide new insights into empirical questions in the elds of political economy and public economics. In my research, this link between theoretical and econometric modeling has taken a variety of forms depending upon the question at hand. In some cases, such as in my work on the impact of media bias, I use theoretical models to provide simple testable predictions, which are then examined empirically. In other cases, the link between the theory and empirical work is even tighter. In my work on school district consolidation, for example, I develop an equilibrium empirical model of mergers that is rooted in the economics of matching. Similarly, in my work on momentum in sequential elections, I develop and estimate a model of voting and social learning. I have also used theoretical models of the political process, as in my research on the e ect of intergovernmental grants on local spending choices, in order to identify endogeneity problems and to motivate instrumental variables to correct for such problems. Finally, I have used theoretical models in order to provide a framework for conducting empirical welfare analysis, as evidenced in my work on socially optimal districting. Below I describe the substance of my research in several areas. I rst describe recent work on the acquisition of information by voters. The second section discusses my work on the economics of political borders. The third area applies insights developed in the theoretical literature on legislative bargaining in order to empirically investigate the role of Congressional institutions in the allocation of federal funds. Fourth, I discuss several papers in local public nance and scal federalism. I then describe several additional papers.