About

Ethan Kaplan is a Professor of Economics at the University of Maryland at College Park. His research spans the areas of political economy, labor economics, applied microeconomics, economic inequality, and empirical macroeconomics. He has contributed to understanding the political control over redistricting, the effects of school desegregation on ideology and attitudes, political polarization, campaign contributions, voter turnout, and the political economy of labor unions. His work also explores the influence of media bias, the impact of natural disasters on special interest politics, and the political consequences of outsourcing and wages. Kaplan's scholarly output includes numerous articles published or accepted in leading economic journals such as the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, the Journal of Public Economics, and the Quarterly Journal of Economics. He has also authored book chapters on media bias and currency crises, and has been involved in policy analysis and public discourse through various policy papers and media coverage. His research is characterized by empirical analysis and a focus on the intersection of politics and economics, contributing to a deeper understanding of how political processes and economic policies interact.

Research topics

• Economics
• Geography
• Political Science
• Computer Science
• Economic geography
• Econometrics
• Mathematics
• Political economy
• Public administration
• Law
• Demographic economics

Selected publications

• Political Control Over Redistricting and the Partisan Balance in Congress∗

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2026-01-01

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Political Control Over Redistricting and the Partisan Balance in Congress

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• A Different World: Enduring Effects of School Desegregation on Ideology and Attitudes

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2025-01-01

  reportOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  In 1975, a federal court ordered the desegregation of public schools in Jefferson County, KY.In order to approximately equalize the share of minorities across schools, students were assigned to a busing schedule that depended on the first letter of their last name.We use the resulting quasirandom variation to estimate the long-run impact of attending an inner-city school on political participation and preferences among whites.Drawing on administrative voter registration records and an original survey, we find that being bused to an inner-city school significantly increases support for the Democratic Party and its candidates more than forty years later.Consistent with the idea that exposure to an inner-city environment causes a permanent change in ideological outlook, we also find evidence that bused individuals are much less likely to believe in a "just world" (i.e., that success is earned rather than attributable to luck) and, more tentatively, that they become more supportive of some forms of redistribution.Taken together, our findings imply that witnessing economic deprivation can durably sensitize individuals to issues of inequality and fairness.

  PublisherDOI

• A Different World: Enduring Effects of School Desegregation on Ideology and Attitudes

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Political Control Over Redistricting and the Partisan Balance in Congress

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2025-05-01

  reportOpen accessSenior author

  We estimate the impact of a political party's ability to unilaterally redistrict Congressional seats upon partisan seat share allocations in the U.S. House of Representatives.Controlling for stateXdecade and year effects, we find an 8.2 percentage point increase in the Republican House seat share in the three elections following Republican control over redistricting in the past two decades.We only find significant effects for Democrats in large states.Effects are one half of the average seat gap between the parties in the 2010s.Differences across parties reflect more denied trifectas due to an opposite party governor in Democratic states and greater impacts for Republicans in small states.Differences do not reflect a rise in racial gerrymandering.

  PublisherDOI

• Between Government and Market: The Political Economics of Labor Unions

  Annual Review of Economics · 2025-04-23 · 3 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  We survey and summarize recent literature on labor unions in political economy. While labor unions have been a long-standing subject of study in labor and macroeconomics, until recently they have been less studied by political economists, despite being important political actors in many policy-relevant contexts. We first organize the literature on the external influence of unions on the political system, including effects on voting, campaign finance, lobbying, and intraparty bargaining. We then discuss work on the internal politics and organization of unions, including issues of selection, representation, and union aggregation of preferences. We pay special attention to the economic and political effects of public sector unions. We also discuss union behavior in weakly institutionalized contexts, where crime, corruption, rent-seeking, political strikes, and violence are all issues. We conclude with directions for future work.

  PublisherDOI

• From the Classroom to the Ballot Box: Turnout and Partisan Consequences of Education

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2025-10-01

  reportOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  We estimate the impact of education on voter turnout and partisanship using a regression discontinuity design based on school-entry cutoffs and exact date of birth.Drawing on nationwide administrative voter registration data, we find that individuals who were slotted to enter school one year earlier are more likely to vote and more likely to register as independents.These reduced-form effects may be driven by changes in educational attainment or by differences in the quality of individuals' educational experiences.We leverage age-related heterogeneity in effect sizes to isolate the role of educational attainment.Our results imply that an additional year of schooling increases turnout by about 3 percentage points.

  PublisherDOI

• Pandering in the Shadows: How Natural Disasters Affect Special Interest Politics

  American Economic Journal Economic Policy · 2025-07-30 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  We exploit the quasi-random timing of natural disasters to study the connection between public attention to politics and legislators’ support for special interests. We show that when a disaster strikes, the news media reduce coverage of politics in general and of individual legislators in particular, and members of the House of Representatives become significantly more likely to adopt special interest donors’ positions. The evidence implies that politicians are more inclined to take actions benefiting special interests when the public is distracted. More broadly, our findings suggest that attention to politics improves electoral accountability even in an environment with stringent transparency requirements. (JEL D72, L82, Q54)

  PublisherDOI

• From the Classroom to the Ballot Box: Turnout and Partisan Consequences of Education

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Between Government and Market: The Political Economics of Labor Unions

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Arindrajit Dubé

  99 shared

• Suresh Naidu

  85 shared

• Dani Rodrik

  6 shared

• Owen Thompson

  Williams College

  6 shared

• Stefano DellaVigna

  University of California, Berkeley

  5 shared

• Christopher Boone

  University of Massachusetts Amherst

  5 shared

• Lucas Goodman

  5 shared

• Christopher Boone

  2 shared

Education

• Ph.D.

  UC Berkeley

  2005

• Other

  Institute for International Economic Studies at Stockholm University