This paper uses panel data from the 16 main states in India during the period 1967- 1999 to study the effects of having higher female representation in the State Legislatures on public goods, policy and expenditure. I find that women legislators make different decisions than men legislators....

Hundreds of studies have failed to establish the effects of decentralisation on a number of important policy goals. This paper examines the cases of Bolivia and Colombia to explore decentralisation’s effects on government responsiveness and poverty-orientation. I first summarize economic data...

This paper analyzes the role of public and private responsibility in the provision of public goods. We emphasize that a typical public good will require many different inputs which raises the possibility of partnerships to exploit comparative advantages of different parties. But hold-up problems...

How much should governments subsidize the development of new clean technologies? We use patent citation data to investigate the relative intensity of knowledge spillovers in clean and dirty technologies in two technological fields: energy production and transportation. We introduce a new...

By employing a comparative method that analyzes China’s increasing presence in different Latin America countries, this study explores key features and implications of Beijing’s approach towards this region. Colombia, Ecuador and Peru are used as case studies to evaluate China’s diplomatic...

I examine decentralization through the lens of the local dynamics that it unleashes. The national effects of decentralization are simply the sum of its local-level effects. Hence to understand decentralization we must first understand how local government works. This paper proposes a theory of...

Hundreds of studies have failed to establish the effects of decentralization on a number of important policy goals. This paper examines the remarkable case of Bolivia to explore decentralization's effects on government responsiveness and poverty-orientation. I first summarize econometric results...

A unifying theme in the literature on organizations such as public bureaucracies and private non-profits is the importance of missions, as opposed to profit, as an organizational goal. Such mission-oriented organizations are frequently staffed by motivated agents who subscribe to the mission....

A statistical problem that arises in several fields is that of estimating the features of an unknown distribution, which may be conditioned on covariates, using a sample of binomial observations on whether draws from this distribution exceed threshold levels set by experimental design....

This paper examines the process and outcomes of democratic decision-making in clubs where a club is defined by their sets of members whose preferences and decisions relate to the set of members in the club: the electorate to endogenous. Examples range from international organizations like the...