We examine electricity market reform in Brazil: from the 1990s till 2004 the largely hydro-powered market cleared using a market mechanism, and in March 2004 reformed to a single buyer structure. We model monthly log price differences using a two-state Markov Switching model, allowing water...

A feature of recent monetary policy asset purchase programmes is the reinvestment policy: the central bank announces to keep the overall volume of assets on its balance sheet constant for some time. In this paper, we systematically assess the macroeconomic effects of such reinvestment policies....

A well-functioning bureaucracy is a precondition for efficient public goods provision. However, bureaucratic decision-making is still largely seen as a black box. We provide novel insights into the preferences of bureaucrats regarding their work outcomes. We focus on a major public sector...

Why do politicians sometimes pursue policies with uncertain outcomes? We present a model in which politicians are unable to pre-commit to a status quo policy, and where investors and voters face a conflict over the division of output. Politicians may deviate from the status quo and pursue risky...

We present a simple model, illustrating how democracy may improve the quality of the economic institutions. The model further suggests that institutional quality varies more across autocracies than across democracy and that the positive effect of democracies on economic institutional quality...

We compile biographical information on more than 5,000 Prussian politicians and exploit newly digitized administrative data to examine whether landowning and landless elites differ in the extent to which they support health infrastructure projects. Using exogenous variation in soil texture, we...