Navid Siami

Ph.D. Candidate | UBC Sauder School 

Robert H. Lee Graduate School
UBC Sauder School of Business
Henry Angus Building
137 - 2053 Main Mall
Vancouver, BC Canada V6T 1Z2

Phone: 604-842-1984 
Email: navid.siami@gmail.com

Bio

Navid Siami is a Ph.D. job market candidate at the University of British Columbia's Sauder School of Business. His main research interest is applied microeconomics, more specifically questions related to managerial decision making under uncertainty. He has tackled questions in Industrial Organisations, Environmental Economics, and Government and Business Relations.

Job Market Paper

Asymmetric Information, Re-election Pressure and Political Decision Making under Uncertainty

This paper examines the interaction of reelection pressure and asymmetric information in decision making under uncertainty by politicians. Using the normal-normal model of Bayesian belief formation, I show that the closer the election, the higher the incumbent politicians refrain from implementing the optimal policy and deviate towards their base’s bias. The model is also extended to endogenize the information gathering of the politicians. The implications of the theoretical model are tested with a dataset on gubernatorial decisions during the national Covid-19 crisis. A difference-in-differences empirical strategy shows that the governors who had an upcoming election in 2020 were biased towards their base. The Democrat and Republican governors who did not face a forthcoming election behaved statistically similar to each other.