Is It Worth It? On the Returns to Holding Political Office

Heléne Berg

No 7406, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

Abstract: This paper estimate causal effects of being elected in a local election on monetary returns. The claim for causality can be made thanks to a research design where the income of some candidate who just barely won a seat is compared to that of some other candidate who was close to winning a seat for the same party, but ultimately did not. The design is made possible thanks to comprehensive data covering all political candidates in the period 1991{2006. I establish that monetary returns are absent both in the short and long run. Instead, politicians seem to be motivated by non-monetary returns, and I show that being elected locally once can be an effective starting point for enjoying such payoffs.

Keywords: returns to politics; incumbency effects; regression discontinuity design (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C23 D72 J44 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lma and nep-pol
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ces:ceswps:_7406

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