This paper develops a two-country model to study two questions. How do the degrees of centralization of redistribution and of factor mobility affect the productive efficiency of the economies? What degrees of centralization of redistribution and of factor mobility are likely to be chosen by...

This paper studies the effect of additional government revenues on political corruption and on the quality of politicians, both with theory and data. The theory is based on a political agency model with career concerns and endogenous entry of candidates. The data refer to Brazil, where federal...

This paper shows that the body of appointed officials that a new democracy inherits from the previous regime is a key determinant of the extent of electoral fraud and clientelistic spending in new democracies. I develop a model that predicts that appointed officials have stronger incentives to...

This paper empirically assesses the incidence and efficiency of Round I of the federal urban Empowerment Zone (EZ ) program using confidential microdata from the Decennial Census and the Longitudinal Business Database. Using rejected and future applicants to the EZ program as controls, we find...

Survey data suggest that cropsharing contracts exhibit a much higher degree of uniformity than is warranted by economic fundamentals. We propose a dynamic model of contract choice to explain this phenomenon. Landowners and tenants recontract periodically, taking into account expected returns as...

In a series of binary choice problems, we investigate how a chooser's risk taking changes when others share in their personal risk, either equally or unequally. We find that when the safe option yields inequality, the risky option is taken significantly more often. On the other hand, the...

I discuss the measurement of world poverty and inequality, with particular attention to the role of purchasing power parity (PPP) price indexes from the International Comparison Project. Global inequality increased with the latest revision of the ICP, and this reduced the global poverty line...

One lingering puzzle is why voluntary contributions to public goods decline over time in experimental and real-world settings. We show that the decline of cooperation is driven by individual preferences for imperfect conditional cooperation. Many people's desire to contribute less than others,...