Term Length and the Effort of Politicians
利用阿根廷国会中随机分配的任期长度自然实验，研究发现较长任期能增加立法者的努力，原因在于努力回报需要多期才能实现，较长任期更可能捕获这些回报。
We evaluate the effects of a fundamental lever of constitutional design: the duration of public office terms. We present a simple model grounded in interviews with legislators and highlight three forces shaping incentives to exert legislative effort. We exploit two natural experiments in the Argentine Congress (where term lengths were assigned randomly) to ascertain which forces are empirically dominant. Results for separate measures as well as an aggregate index of legislative effort show that longer terms increase effort. Shorter terms appear to discourage effort not due to campaign distractions but due to an investment payback logic: when effort yields returns over multiple periods, longer terms yield a higher chance of capturing those returns. A broader implication is that job stability may promote effort despite making individuals less accountable.