Corruption is often cited as a fundamental obstacle to economic development, making anticorruption initiatives an important policy objective. However, there is little convincing empiricalevidence concerning the benefits of anti-corruption reform. We fill this gap by identifying a set ofcountries...

The CIA intervened regularly in Latin America politics during the Cold War, in some cases going asfar as bringing about regime change. While these interventions may have been considered successful from the US perspective, it is less clear what the economic and political consequences were for the...

The US sugar program has long delivered significant subsidies to a concentrated group of sugar growers at the expense of American consumers. In 2013, however, an amendment in the House of Representatives attempted to seriously reduce those subsidies. The amendment narrowly lost. A similar...

I examine 19th century Mexico for a better understanding of how and why it was so difficult to create the institutions of a modern state. I show that Mexico suffered from a vicious cycle in that period, something that is probably common to many developing countries, in that they needed a large...

While we have decades of evidence that economically free economies grow faster and are more productive than un-free ones, we have less knowledge about the effect of economic freedom on groups that have traditionally been disadvantaged. I study the causal effects of large and sustained jumps in...

This study investigates the impact of anti-sweatshop activism on garment industry employment and the number of firms in Bangladesh following the 2013 Rana Plaza factory disaster. The disaster led to activism that created two major brand-enforced factory fire and safety agreements. We employ a...