European Enlightenment thinkers were right in stressing the political dimension of inequality, rather than referring to "natural differences" as some others did after them in the 19th or 20th centuries. Drawing from recent theoretical and empirical contributions in social sciences and in...

I propose a personal reading of some theories of social justice at a moment when the issue of equality or equity appears to be back on the ‘development agenda’. Nowadays the term equity tends to be most often associated with the equality of opportunity principle. After having briefly...

In this paper we study the consequences of endogenous active labor market policies. In particular it is assumed that all viable policies have to please the employed majority. The main objective is to seek the answer to the following question: In what sense does the political equilibrium deviate...

In this paper I test two models of strategic debt behavior. The general idea is that if a government anticipates the possibility of defeat in the next election it will try to use the debt strategically in order to influence the policy of its successor. Previous empirical studies have either...

A couple of months before the Swedish election in 1998, the incumbent government distributed 2.3 billion SEK to 42 out of 115 applying municipalities. This was the first wave of a four-year long grant program intended to support local investment programs aimed at an ecological sustainable...

Are grants to Swedish municipalities tactical? In this essay, I derive testable implications from a theoretical voting model and test these on a panel of 255 Swedish municipalities, 1981 - 1995. In order to decide which regions that are politically powerful, both election results, and survey...

(english) The classical and more recent theories on development all fail to explain Madagascar’s long-running economic underperformance. This paper proposes a reinterpretation of Malagasy history based on the analytical framework of political economy. Our analyses point to the fact that,...

(english) This paper is an attempt to assess the relevance of the use of the North, Wallis and Weingast (2009) framework to explain the performances of Burkina Faso in terms of economic growth and development. The political history of Burkina Faso has been very unstable until president Campaoré...

(english) This last decade has seen the emergence of a new field of research in development economics: randomised control trials. This paper explores the contrast between the (many) limitations and (very narrow) real scope of these methods and their success in sheer number and media coverage....