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Title: Empirical Essays in State Political Economy

Citation Type: Dissertation/Thesis

Publication Year: 2001

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Abstract: Chapter one examines voter rationality. Standard agency theory suggests that rational voters will vote to re-elect competent politicians. Further, rational voters should try to filter signal from noise when assessing the competence of their elected agents. This paper measures the extent to which voters separate signal from noise in deciding whether to re-elect their state governors. I find some evidence of sophistication: voters appear to evaluate their state's economic performance relative to the national economy. Yet I also find evidence of irrationality: voters in oil-producing states tend to re-elect incumbents during oil price rises, and dump then when the oil price drops. Similarly, voters in procyclical states are consistently fooled into re-electing incumbents during national booms. I conclude that voters are best characterized as quasi-rational. Chapters two and three turn to the effects of unilateral divorce laws. Chapter two examines whether these laws caused divorce rates to rise. The Coase Theorem suggests that merely redistributing property rights should not change marriage-market allocation. The existing empirical literature disagrees. I revisit this literature showing that these results reflect a failure to jointly consider both the political endogeneity of these divorce laws and the dynamic response of divorce rates to a shock to the political regime. Taking explicit account of the dynamic response of divorce rates, I find that liberalized divorce laws caused a discernible rise in divorce rates for about a decade, but find little evidence of a persistent effect. While unilateral divorce laws have only small effects on marriage-market allocation, chapter three find profound effects on distribution. Suicide rates provide a quantifiable measure of well-being, and we find that female suicide rates fell by about a fifth when states liberalized access to divorce. Domestic violence against women declined by about a third, and intimate homicide rates declined by a tenth, suggesting that these laws improved outcomes for women. Legal institutions appear to have profound effects on outcomes within families.

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Authors: Wolfers, Justin

Institution: Harvard University

Department: Department of Economics

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Degree: Doctor of Philosophy

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Data Collections: IPUMS USA

Topics: Family and Marriage, Other

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