This paper investigates the relationship between taxation and firm performance in developing countries. Taking firm-level data from the World Bank Enterprise Surveys (WBES) and tax data from the Government Revenue Dataset (ICTD/UNU-WIDER), our results suggest that tax revenue benefits to firm...

Although the theoretical literature often uses lobbying and corruption synonymously, the empirical literature associates lobbying with the preferred mean for exerting influence in developed countries and corruption with the preferred one in developing countries. This paper challenges these...

This paper empirically investigates the link between the level of government revenue per capita and six indicators of quality of governance in an unbalanced panel data set consisting of all countries in the world (217) using data from 1980 to 2020. It uses single-equation GMM techniques and a...

There has been a phenomenal global increase in the proportion of women in politics in the last two decades, but there is no evidence of how this influences economic performance. We investigate this using data on competitive elections to India's state assemblies, leveraging close elections to...

This paper is a short history of the Indian economy since 1968. India today is a changed country from what it was half a century ago, when Myrdal published his Asian Drama. The stranglehold of low growth has been broken, its population below the poverty line has fallen markedly, and India has...

We investigate how different forms of scrutiny affect dishonesty, using Gneezy's (2005) deception game. We add a third player whose interests are aligned with those of the sender. We find that lying behavior is not sensitive to revealing the sender's identity to the observer. The option for...

India is a country characterized by a huge informal sector. At the same time, it is a country where the extent of corruption in every sector is remarkably high. Stifling bureaucratic interference and corruption at every stage of economic activities is one of the main reasons behind high...

Available wisdom suggests that a negative relationship prevails between economic freedom and perceived corruption among firms. However, the relationship is far from linear and a number of complex interactions make it fairly nuanced. We show that greater competition may accentuate the problem of...

This paper proposes new composite measures of relative and dynamic state performance to improve governance and delivery of public programs in developing countries with a federal structure. We rank the performance of 19 major Indian states on two large development programs launched by the Indian...

We consider the largely unexpected shock caused by the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in India to assess whether major crises that impact the well-being of a large number of individuals can be catalysts for civic activism. Exploiting state-level variation in COVID-19 peaks and...