Do Political Leaders Impact Economic Freedom at the Local Level? Evidence from Close Elections
Zach Raff,
Andrew Swanson,
Danielle Zanzalari
Abstract:This paper examines whether state and local political leaders’ partisan affiliations affect economic freedom at the metropolitan statistical area (MSA) level. Because political leaders’ partisan affiliations likely correlate with unobserved state- and local-level characteristics that also affect the economic freedom levels of MSAs, we use a regression discontinuity design that leverages close elections as natural experiments to identify a causal effect. Using Stansel (2019)’s index, which aggregates a bundle o… Show more
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