Recently, there has been a growing interest in newly developed econometric tools to conduct counterfactual analysis when a treated unit experiences a policy intervention, and an artificial control group has to be constructed. Adopting novel penalized synthetic control methods, we quantify the...

We study the private gains to bureaucrats from their political alignment with elected politicians. Whereas existing studies generally rely on proxies for politician-bureaucrat political alignment, a rare feature of our data allows measuring it directly since 27% of bureaucrats ran for political...

Numerous countries are introducing citizen feedback schemes to tame corruption. We study how best to incorporate feedback in public officials’ incentives. The main novelty of our proposal is to allow citizens to directly influence officials’ pay. We consider a situation in which...

Formal and informal institutions are often viewed as complements or substitutes in empirical and theoretical works. However, no evidence of complementarities or substitutes is found in our empirical analysis of the interrelation between formal and informal decentralization across 64 provinces of...

Africa’s interior-to-coast roads are well suited to export natural resources, but not to support regional trade. Are they the optimal response to geography and comparative advantage, or the result of suboptimal political distortions? We investigate the political determinants of road paving in...

The paper analyzes the contribution of public capital to private output using several meta-analytical techniques. Both fixed and random effects models are estimated by Weighted Least Squares. Sample overlap across studies is explicitly controlled for by employing a full' Generalized Least...