Daily Events
14:00 | Room 402 | Applied Micro Research Seminar
University of Lucerne, Switzerland
Abstract: We investigate the causal effect of winning a seat in the Swiss National Council on both the likelihood of holding corporate board positions and the number of directorships held. Our analysis focuses on narrowly elected and narrowly non-elected candidates between 1931 and 2015 using a regression discontinuity design. We draw on comprehensive data covering all candidates for the Swiss National Council and all directors of Swiss companies. We digitized previously unavailable records on political candidates from 1931 to 1971 and on corporate directors from 1934 to 2003, and integrated them with existing datasets covering candidates from 1975 to 2015 and directors from 2004 to 2018. The analysis builds on a measure of electoral closeness in proportional representation systems which we recently developed.
