We show that a large electorate of ignorant voters can succeed in establishing high levels of electoral accountability. In our model an incumbent politician is confronted with a large number of voters who receive very noisy signals about her performance. We find that the accountability problem...

Although formal education is often considered an indicator of political leaders' quality, the evidence on the effectiveness of educated leaders is mixed. Besides, minimum education qualifications are increasingly being used as requirements for contesting elections, making it critical to...

We examine the effects of randomly introduced economic inequality on voluntary cooperation, and whether this relationship is influenced by the quality of local institutions, as proxied by corruption. We use representative data from a large-scale lab-in-the-field public goods experiment with over...

Unlike much of the growing literature on political clientelism, this short paper contains mainly the author's general reflections on the broad issues of governance (or mis-governance including corruption), democracy, and state capacity that clientelism has an impact on. It then analyses how its...

We show that the incorporation of offshore entities increases when oil and gas exploration licences are awarded. We exploit leaked data on the incorporation of shell companies and detailed information on tax havens and the awarding rounds of oil licences to construct a new data set covering 119...

The debate on whether democracy and inequality increase the level of redistribution is ongoing. We construct a model that predicts higher probability of redistribution in democracies than autocracies through social transfers. Higher inequality leads to more redistribution in democracies but not...