Good public policy needs to be evidence based. However, the evidence base is thin for many policy issues. How can policy makers best respond to such thin areas of research that are also quite likely to change over time? Our survey investigates the evolution of the econometric evidence base for...

The theory of fiscal and regulatory competition between jurisdictions is more advanced than its empirical testing. This is particularly true of labor regulation in general, and minimum wage regulation in particular, and especially so for developing countries. This paper utilizes the spatial lag...

Anger is an important driver in shaping economic activities, particularly in instances that involve strategic interactions between individuals. Here we test whether anger impairs the capacity to think strategically, and we analyze the implications of our result on bargaining and cooperation...

Governments do not have perfect information regarding the priorities and the needs of different groups in the economy. This lack of knowledge opens the door for different groups to lobby the government in order to receive the government's support. We set up a model of hierarchical contests and...

We identify regional public investment priorities by studying the development of the water pipe system in the largest district in Poland. For this purpose, we take advantage of a major administrative re-form, implemented on 1 January 1999, which substantially changed the structure of Polish...

Governments do not have perfect information regarding constituent priorities and needs. This lack of knowledge opens the door for groups to lobby in order to affect the government's taxation levels. We examine the political economy of decentralized revenue-raising authority in light of social...

This paper develops a micro-founded city systems model with an endogenous number of cities to explore whether local governments establish the optimal city size when production processes involve environmental pollution. Our analysis delivers two key insights. First, if an optimal scheme to...

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...

For patriotic citizens, living in their native country is intrinsically preferable compared to living in the diaspora. In this paper, we analyze the implications of such a patriotic lock-in in a world with international migration and redistributive taxation. In a formal model of redistribution...

Texas engaged in a large-scale policy experiment when it instituted the Top 10% Plan. This policy guarantees automatic admission to their state university of choice for all high school seniors who graduate in the top decile of their high school class. We find evidence that households reacted...