No Kin in the Game: Moral Hazard and War in the US Congress
研究美国国会议员在征兵制战争期间的投票行为，发现议员有适龄儿子时反对征兵投票减少7-11个百分点，表明代理问题导致政治精英未能内化战争成本。
We study agency frictions in the US Congress. We examine the long-standing hypothesis that political elites engage in conflict because they fail to internalize the associated costs. We compare the voting behavior of legislators with draft age sons versus draft age daughters during the conscription-era wars of the twentieth century. We estimate that having a draft age son reduces proconscription voting by 7–11 percentage points. Support for conscription recovers when a legislator’s son ages out of eligibility. We establish that agency problems contribute to political conflict and that politicians are influenced by private incentives orthogonal to political concerns or ideological preferences.