The policy of mandated representation (reservation) for disadvantaged social groups in Indian village councils or Gram Panchayats has been the subject of numerous studies. The implicit, and often unstated, assumption that underlies most of these studies is that the president of the council is...

1. Lebanon has one of the highest public debt stocks (relative to GDP) in the world, currently at over 185 percent of 2003 GDP. Economic policy continues to be dominated by chronic imbalances in government finances which have seen the budget deficit average over 17 percent of GDP over the past...

This paper addresses the determinants of public expenditure policies, by reviewing theories and empirical investigations of what features explain the budget process and how the various attributes of actors—including politicians, bureaucrats, interest groups, and donors—and of...

While government spending on pro-poor community asset creation and income-transfers could have compounding positive effects on poverty reduction, it is important to first study trends in the allocation of funds, particularly as they relate to the susceptibility of the program to political...

In this paper, we evaluate four explanations for economic stagnation that have been proposed in the literature: coordination failures, ineffective mix of occupational choices, insufficient human capital accumulation, and politico-economic considerations. We calibrate models that embody these...

This paper presents empirical evidence regarding the effect of simultaneous antitrust and trade policy on productivity. We find that treating antitrust across countries as an exogenous policy overestimates the impact of competition on productivity by as much as 18%.