Does deliberation produce any lasting effects? “America in One Room” was a national field experiment in which more than 500 randomly selected registered voters were brought from all over the country to deliberate on five major issues facing the country. A pre-post control group was also surveyed on the same questions after the weekend and about a year later. There were significant differences in voting intention and in actual voting behavior a year later among the deliberators compared to the control group. This article accounts for these differences by showing how deliberation stimulated a latent variable of political engagement. If deliberation has lasting effects on political engagement, then it provides a rationale for attempts to scale the deliberative process to much larger numbers. The article considers methods for doing so in the context of the broader debate about mini-publics, isolated spheres of deliberation situated within a largely non-deliberative society.

State repression durably impacts political behaviors in repressed populations, yet research has largely focused on individuals remaining in affected places. Seldom considered are behaviors of individuals who flee to other countries. We examine one such population, Jews exiting the Soviet Bloc, using a unique administrative dataset rarely available in the immigration context. Applying a within-family research design, we examine the impact of having lived longer in the Soviet Bloc on political behavior. In contrast with typical findings of state repression's demobilizing effects, we find that siblings who lived longer in the Soviet Union are significantly more likely to vote in elections. We also find a differentially greater tendency to affiliate with conservative political parties, which we attribute to backlash against communism. We consider alternative mechanisms including family dynamics and economics, and find supportive evidence for similar effects in Israel, one of the other major recipients of this refugee population.

Using administrative criminal records from Texas, we show that heat increases crime in a heterogeneous way across neighborhoods with different housing and economic characteristics. The heterogeneity allows us to predict how effective certain forms of adaptation will be at reducing the impacts of climate change on criminal activity. Our simulations show adaptation reducing, but not completely offsetting, these impacts. Differential rates of adaptation across neighborhoods will likely exacerbate the consequences of already unequal exposure to climate change across society.

Using data on the paths of all hurricanes in the Atlantic Basin from 1992 to 2017, this paper studies whether migration has served as a form of adaptation to hurricane risk. The findings show that on average hurricanes have little to no impact on county out-migration, with population-weighted exposure to hurricanes increasing slightly over the sample period. Counties with high economic activity see net in-migration in the years after a hurricane. Further, return migration likely plays a role in offsetting any out-migration in the year of the storm. The intensity of pre-hurricane migration between county pairs is a strong predictor of excess migration after a hurricane, suggesting that existing economic and social ties dominate in post-hurricane migration decisions. Given existing policies and incentives, the economic and social benefits that people derive from living in high-risk areas currently outweigh the incentive to adapt to future storms by relocating across counties.

Most U.S. government spending on highways and bridges is done through “scaling” procurement auctions, in which private construction firms submit unit price bids for each piece of material required to complete a project. Using data on bridge maintenance projects undertaken by the Massachusetts Department of Transportation (MassDOT), we present evidence that firm bidding behavior in this context is consistent with optimal skewing under risk aversion: firms limit their risk exposure by placing lower unit bids on items with greater uncertainty. We estimate the amount of uncertainty in each auction, and the distribution of bidders’ private costs and risk aversion. Simulating equilibrium item-level bids under counterfactual settings, we estimate the fraction of project spending that is due to risk and evaluate auction mechanisms under consideration by policymakers. We find that scaling auctions provide substantial savings relative to lump sum auctions and show how our framework can be used to evaluate alternative auction designs.