"The authors examine a unique public spending program that is proliferating across developing countries, the constituency development fund, to investigate when legislators exert more effort on behalf of their constituents. Using data from India, they find that legislator effort is significantly...

About 90 percent of the world's nearly 200 sovereign states have national legislatures or parliaments. With the spread of democracy and the rise of multiparty political systems, these bodies are playing larger roles in government. Increasingly, legislatures and their members perform four...

This report explores the scope and limits of parliamentary control over public expenditure in Bangladesh. It focuses on the collective method, identifying the role of three financial committees and a sample of four ministerial committees, referred to here as oversight committees, in the scrutiny...

"Using 2005 firm level data for 26 countries in Eastern and Central Europe, this paper estimates performance gaps between male and female-owned businesses, while controlling for location by industry and country. The findings show that female entrepreneurs have a significantly smaller scale of...