Many employment relationships concede rents to workers. Depending on the political institutions, the presence of such rents allows employers to use the threat of withdrawing them to control their workers' political behavior, such as their votes in the absence of secret ballot. We examine the...

Policymakers often prescribe that microfinance institutions increase interest rates to eliminate their reliance on subsidies. This strategy makes sense if the poor are rate insensitive: then microlenders increase profitability (or achieve sustainability) without reducing the poor's access to...

This paper challenges the current belief that income inequality has a negative relationship with economic growth. It uses an improved data set on income inequality, which not only reduces measurement error, but also allows estimation via a panel technique. Panel estimation makes it possible to...