Showing 1 - 10 of 397
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...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10011079880
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...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10004961458
We present a dynamic model of free riding in which n infinitely lived agents choose between private consumption and contributions to a durable public good g. We characterize the set of continuous Markov equilibria in economies with reversibility, where investments can be positive or negative; and...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10011188549
Some public goods are provided entirely with private contributions, others with a mixture of public and private funding, and still others are entirely publicly funded. To explain this variation, a model of dual provision is developed that endogenizes public and private funding. Members of the...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005775162
We study budget formation in a model featuring separation of powers. In our model, the legislature designs a budget bill that can include a cap on total spending and earmarked allocations to designated public projects. Each project provides random benefits to one of many interest groups. The...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005050203
We analyze the joint dynamics of religious beliefs, scientific progress and coalitional politics along both religious and economic lines. History offers many examples of the recurring tensions between science and organized religion, but as part of the paper's motivating evidence we also uncover...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10011262916
attention, however. In this paper, we present a simple theory of the emergence and persistence of inefficient states. The …
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005778107
This paper examines the relationship between the concentration of political power in legislative bargaining and the predictability of the process governing the recognition of legislators. Our main result establishes that, for a broad class of legislative bargaining games, if the recognition...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10010796681
We examine the effect of electoral rules on the quality of elected officials using a unique field experiment which induced randomized variation in the method of council elections in 250 villages in Afghanistan. In particular, we compare at-large elections, with a single multi-member district, to...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10010772574
We exploit three natural experiments in Argentina in order to study the role of legislative malapportionment on the biased federal tax sharing scheme prevalent in the country. We do not find support to attribute it to legislative malapportionment during periods when democratic governments were...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10010969273