I develop and test two competing models assessing the impacts of targeted government transferson a local incumbent's electoral performance. I take advantage of the randomized roll-out of alarge-scale Conditional Cash Transfer program in the Philippines, which offers an ideal setting totest the...

Intuition tells us that strategic voting is most likely in marginal constituencies where the preferred party is a long way behind the second placed parity. Some formal theories suggest there should be complete desertion of all but two candidates (Palfrey 1989), or additionally that the second...

This paper develops an infinite-horizon, political agency model with a continuum of political districts, in which incumbent politicians can improve their re-election probability by attracting swing voters in key states through strategic trade protection. A unique equilibrium is shown to exist...

We investigate the causes of civil war, using a new data set of wars during 1960-99. We test a greed theory focusing on the ability to finance rebellion, against a grievance theory focusing on ethnic and religious divisions, political repression and inequality. We find that greed considerably...

We consider dynamic discrete choice models with heterogeneity in both the levels parameter and the state dependence parameter. We first analyse the purchase of full fat milk using a long consumer panel (T 100) on many households. The large T nature of the panel allows us to consistently...

The distribution dynamics of incomes across Indian states are examined using the entire income distribution rather than using standard regression approaches. The period 1965 to 1997 exhibits twin-peaked dynamics: there are two income convergence clubs at 50% and 125% of the national average...

The Kenyan Constituency Development Fund (CDF) aims to alleviate poverty by allocating resources to constituencies which MPs and residents decide how to spend.  In this paper we assess whether MPs' re-election chances were affected by their management of the CDF.  For this purpose we analyse...

We run a novel field experiment to link managers of African manufacturing firms.  The experiment features exogenous link formation, exogenous seeding of information and exogenous assignment to treatment and placebo.  We study the impact of the experiment on firm business practices outside of...

This paper investigates two channels through which research and development (R&D) and human capital may affect regional total factor productivity growth in the manufacturing sector, using panel data on 159 EU-15 regions from 1992 to 2005.  Based on the endogenous growth model of Griffith,...