In many countries, elected politicians are overrepresented on corporate boards. This raises concerns about firms gaining political access and has led several countries to ban board membership for office-holders. We test this troubling access-seeking hypothesis against a benign selection hypothesis. Because only the access-seeking hypothesis implies a causal effect of winning elections on board membership, we employ a close-election regression discontinuity design with data on Swiss federal legislators from 1931–2015. We find a substantial overrepresentation of politicians on boards, but at most a small causal effect. Thus, the overrepresentation mostly reflects positive selection, not firms’ pursuit of political access.

Do electoral turnovers discipline offshore finance by raising (expected) accountability and scrutiny? Using bilateral quarterly BIS data on cross-border offshore bank deposits, we study whether national power transitions triggered by elections, particularly narrowly decided turnovers, affect offshore bank deposits. Electoral turnovers generate theoretically ambiguous effects. Increased enforcement expectations may reduce offshore deposits, while precautionary capital flight or rent extraction may increase them. Using a regression discontinuity design and a difference-in-differences analysis, we show that offshore deposits decline by 10 percent following close electoral turnovers. The effect is consistent with an accountability mechanism, suggesting that new governments raise (expected) enforcement and scrutiny and induce wealthy and politically exposed individuals to reduce offshore deposits. These findings demonstrate that political transitions can reshape private portfolio decisions in opaque jurisdictions, even in the absence of new transparency reforms.

This paper studies whether U.S. defense and security aid is systematically diverted by recipient-country elites into offshore bank accounts. I combine project-level data on U.S. defense and security aid disbursements from 2013-2018 with bilateral crossborder bank deposit data from the Bank for International Settlements. Exploiting within-country variation, I find that deposits held in high-secrecy offshore jurisdictions increase in quarters with U.S. defense and security aid disbursements, while deposits in other international financial centers do not. However, this relationship is not broad-based across recipient countries. Instead, it is driven by a small number of countries receiving exceptionally large aid disbursements and by quarters in which aid exceeds high thresholds relative to GDP. In contrast, U.S. economic and development aid is not associated with comparable offshore deposit dynamics. The findings suggest that while elite capture can occur in high-intensity settings, diversion of U.S. defense and security aid is not a structural phenomenon.

This paper investigates how voters react to persistent inaction of mainstream parties in government. We study the illegal burial, dumping, and burning of toxic industrial waste perpetrated by criminal organizations in Southern Italy since the late 1980s. We combine plausibly exogenous geographical variation in exposure to pollutants stemming from historical wind trajectories with the sudden release of information about the exact geo-location of contaminated sites. Difference-in-differences estimates show that, after the information shock, municipalities exposed to toxic winds experienced a persistent decline in turnout of 5.8 percentage points relative to non-exposed municipalities. Using individual-level survey data, we also find that exposure to pollutants reduce trust in parties and in national parliament. Finally, we show that exposure to toxic winds increases the vote share of the challenger Five Star Movement (FSM) in national elections, who actively contrasted mainstream parties’ inaction on the issue.