In a recent paper, Barrett (2006) reaches the conclusion that in general the answer to the question in the title is no. We show in this paper that a focus on the R&D phase in the development of breakthrough technologies changes the picture. The stability of international treaties improves and...

Different countries have been following different reform paths since the early 1990s. We develop a simple dynamic model of policy reform that captures some of the determinants that underlie these differences. The model emphasizes the interaction between domestic institutions and international...

Achieving efficiency for many global environmental problems requires voluntary cooperation among sovereign countries due to the public good nature of pollution abatement. The theory of international environmental agreements (IEAs) in economics seeks to understand how cooperation among countries...

Critics of foreign aid programs argue that these funds often support corrupt governments and inefficient bureaucracies. Supporters argue that foreign aid can be used to reward good governments. This paper documents that there is no evidence that less corrupt governments receive more foreign aid....

We evaluate the long-run effects of a decentralized approach to economic development, called community driven development (CDD), a prominent strategy for delivering foreign aid. Notably we revisit a randomized CDD program in Sierra Leone 11 years after launch. We estimate large persistent gains...

This paper explores the roles of different levels of government in assisting the poor. Using a model with utility interdependence, the paper presents some theoretical results on how levels of poor relief vary with the extent of mobility of the poor under both centralized and decentralized...

Recent federal cut-backs of financial support for undergraduates have worsened the financial position of colleges and universities and required them to debate how they will allocate their scarce financial aid resources.Our paper contributes to the debate by providing a model of optimal financial...

The last few decades witnessed a dramatic change in public opinion towards gay people. This paper studies the hypothesis that the AIDS epidemic was a shock that changed the incentive to "come out" and that the ensuing process of mobilization and endogenous political process led to cultural...

We use 201,000 observations from repeated survey data in 61 elections and 9 OECD countries since 1952 to study the formation of vote choices and policy preferences in the electoral season and assess how TV debates contribute to this process. We find that the share of voters who state a...