Information affecting a candidate's reputation might have significant electoral consequences. Do candidates respond to the release of information? Using Brazilian elections and audits as an exogenous source of information, I show that both incumbent and challenger increase their campaign...

The consequences of granting democratic rights to citizens in otherwise authoritarian regimes has been extensively studied. Much less is know about the implications of retracting these rights when a government wants to recentralize power. Autonomous governance in rural China, introduced in the...

A government officials' propensity to corruption, or corruptibility, can be affected by his intertemporal preference over job benefits. Through a dynamic model of rent-seeking behavior, this paper examines how endogenously determined corruptibility changes with monitoring intensity, salary...

This paper explores the feasibility to extend the Standard Cost Model (SCM) for calculating the costs of government regulation by taking all transaction costs into account which stem from the principal/agent relationship between regulatory authorities and economic entities. From that perspective...

Variation in assessor stringency in awarding benefits leaves applicants exposed to uninsured risk that could be systematic if discretion were exercised selectively. We test for this using administrative data on applications to the Dutch disability insurance program. We find that discretion is...

We develop a method to measure the intensity of competition between firms. Our method, which we call the Best Response Measure (BRM), is related to the conduct parameter method, but avoids the main problems associated with that method. The BRM relies on a very general framework and limited data...

Taiwan has been hailed as a world leader in the development of global innovation and industrial clusters for the past decade. This paper investigates the effects of industrial agglomeration on the use of the internet and internet intensity for Taiwan manufacturing firms, and analyses whether the...

This paper investigates the effect of industrial penetration and internet intensity for Taiwan manufacturing firms, and analyses whether the relationships are substitutes or complements. The sample observations are based on 153,081 manufacturing plants, and covers 26 two-digit industry...

This paper tests whether upstream R&D cooperation leads to downstream collusion. We consider an oligopolistic setting where firms enter in research joint ventures (RJVs) to lower production costs or coordinate on collusion in the product market. We show that a sufficient condition for...