What makes a country attractive to foreign investors? To what extent do conditions of governance and politics matter? This book provides the most systematic exploration to date of these crucial questions at the nexus of politics and economics. Using quantitative data and interviews with...

In this project we explore the relationship between leader change and relations between states. Voting in the United Naion's General Assembly (UNGA) is often used as a measure of political proximity between countries. We use UN voting coincidence to examine how changes in leadership affect...

Policies targeting individual companies for economic development incentives, such as tax holidays and abatements, are generally seen as inefficient, economically costly, and distortionary. Despite this evidence, politicians still choose to use these policies to claim credit for attracting...

Research on the economic consequences of corruption has been hampered by the inability to directly measure corruption. Using an innovative methodology that allows respondents to report individual experiences with corruption while minimizing self-incrimination and an objective diagnostic to...

Since the early 1990s, a large number of studies have been undertaken to understand the causes and consequences of corruption. Many of these studies have employed firm-level survey data from various countries. While insightful, these analyses based on firm-level surveys have largely ignored two...