We show that isolated capital cities are robustly associated with greater levels of corruption across US states, in line with the view that this isolation reduces accountability. We then provide direct evidence that the spatial distribution of population relative to the capital affects different...

We present a model of policy development in which competing factions have different ideologies, yet agree on certain common objectives. Policy developers can appeal to a decision maker by making productive investments to improve the quality of their proposals. These investments are specific to a...

Alesina and Tabellini (2007) investigate the normative criteria for allocating policy tasks to bureaucrats versus politicians. While they establish criteria with respect to a number of parameters, they do not give a criterion with respect to the degree of imperfect monitoring. We establish an...

This paper develops a model in which a desire to avoid criticism prompts otherwise public-spirited bureaucrats to behave inefficiently. Decisions are taken to keep interest groups quiet and to keep mistakes out of the public eye. The policy implications of this "minimal squawk" behavior are at...

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...

Because government intervention transfers resources from one party to another, it creates room for corruption. As corruption often undermines the purpose of the intervention, governments will try to prevent it. They may create rents for bureaucrats, induce a misallocation of resources, and...

Building on previous work by Schelling and Crawford, we study a model of bilateral bargaining in which negotiators can make binding commitments at a low positive cost c. Most of our results concern outcomes that survive iterated strict dominance. If commitment attempts never fail, there are...