The notion that foreign aid harms the institutions of recipient governments remains prevalent. We combine new disaggregated aid data and various metrics of political institutions to re-examine this relationship. Long-run cross-section and alternative dynamic panel estimators show a small...

This paper studies the relationship between trade tax and domestic tax reforms and poverty in developing countries, and explores whether the role of public goods provision matters in this relationship. Using a sample of 91 developing countries for the 1980-2016 period, I model the trade tax...

Given the rise in the government debt level in recent times, this paper aims to examine the effect of an increase in government size on risk premium and its transmission in the economy. We jointly identify the term spread shock (originating at the short end and the long end) and the government...

This paper shows how an elite cadre of public sector officials played a key role in the success of administrative reforms in Brazil's state tax administration bureaus in the 1990s. The success of the reforms strengthened public sector bureaucracies and institutions at all government levels,...

Scholars and policy makers believe that democracy will bring prosperity through integration into the global economy via increased international trade. This study tests two theories as to why democracies might trade more. First, political freedom may be correlated with economic freedom, thus...