COVID-19 relief legislation offers a unique setting to study how political representation shapes the distribution of federal assistance to state and local governments. We provide evidence of a substantial small-state bias: an additional Senator or Representative per million residents predicts an...

Critics of foreign aid programs have long argued that poverty reflects government failure. In this paper I analyze the effectiveness of foreign aid programs to gain insights into political regimes in aid recipient countries. My analytical framework shows how three stylized political/economic...

In this paper we demonstrate that legislation has a simple, yet previously undetected impact on firm stock prices. While it is understood that the government and firms have an important relationship, it remains difficult to determine which firms any given piece of legislation will affect, and...

Foreign aid is one of the most important policy tools that rich countries use for helping poor countries to improve population well-being and facilitate economic and institutional development. The empirical evidence on its benefits is mixed and has generated much controversy. This paper presents...

We explore the implications of trade liberalization in economies with State Owned enterprises (SOEs) and shirking. SOEs are modelled as controlled by the members of the enterprise who determine output and effort levels, while facing output prices and wage rates set by government. Enterprise...

This paper describes an efficiency approach to the evaluation of policy changes. Rather than comparing the utility allocations that arise before and after a policy change is introduced, this approach evaluates a policy change by comparing it with other possible changes which might be made from...

This paper considers the problem of policy evaluation in a modern society with heterogeneous agents and diverse groups with conflicting interests. Several different approaches to the policy evaluation problem are compared including the approach adopted in modern welfare economics, the classical...