How well do countries cope with the aftermath of natural disasters? In particular, do international financial flows help buffer countries in the wake of disasters? This paper focuses on hurricanes (one of the most common and destructive types of disasters), and examines the impact of hurricane...

This paper studies the impact of aid volatility in a two-period model where production may occur with either a traditional or a modern technology. Public spending is productive and "time to build" requires expenditure in both periods for the modern technology to be used. The possibility of a...

Contract enforcement is probabilistic, but the probability depends on rules and processes. A stimulus to trade may induce traders to alter rules or processes to improve enforcement. In the model of this paper, such a positive knock-on effect occurs when the elasticity of supply of traders is...

Political institutions can affect corruption. We use audit reports from an anti-corruption program in Brazil to construct new measures of political corruption in local governments and test whether electoral accountability affects the corruption practices of incumbent politicians. We find...

Autocrats in many developing countries have extracted enormous personal rents from power. In addition, they have imposed inefficient policies including pervasive patronage spending. I present a model in which the presence of ethnic identities and the absence of institutionalized succession...

We present a conceptual framework to better understand the interaction between settlement and the emergence of de facto property rights on frontiers prior to governments establishing and enforcing de jure property rights. In this framework, potential rents associated with more exclusivity drives...

We estimate the effect of local media outlets on political accountability in Mexico, focusing on malfeasance by municipal mayors. We study federal grants earmarked for infrastructure projects targeting the poor, and leverage two sources of plausibly exogenous variation. First, we exploit...

While its recent history of civil war, chronic poverty and corrupt governance would cause many to dismiss Sierra Leone as a hopeless case, the country's economic and political performance over the last decade has defied expectations. We examine how several factors--including the legacy of war,...

We conducted a survey covering 20% of villages with 200-1000 population in rural Guinea-Bissau. We interviewed household heads, care-givers of children, and their teachers and schools. We analysed results from 9,947 children, aged 7-17, tested for literacy and numeracy competency. Only 27% of...

An optimal linear world income tax that maximizes a border-neutral social welfare function provides a drastic reduction in world consumption inequality, dropping the Gini coefficient from 0.69 to 0.25. In contrast an optimal decentralized (i.e., within countries) redistribution has miniscule...