This paper studies how media and the quality of institutions affect government action taken before and after a natural disaster. The key elements in this relationship are the media's role as the provider of information to voters about government action, the quality of democracy that pertains to...

There is much interest in the causes of several adverse health outcomes in middle and old age. In searching for new explanations for adverse health outcomes later in life, researchers have started to look beyond behavioural risk factors to examine the effect of shocks to health in utero and in...

This paper discusses the problem of crowding out of insurance by co-existing governmental relief programs - so-called ’charity hazard’ - in a context of different institutional schemes of government relief in Austria and Germany. We test empirically whether an assured partial...

This paper investigates the negative effect of media reports on the provision of public goods by bureaucratic agencies. I provide a simple career concerns model where negative publicity in the media can affect the bureaucrat's future wage. The proposition of the model is tested using data of the...

The aim of this paper is to determine the drivers of a donor’s decision on the composition of aid. We apply a dataset on international post-disaster assistance between 2000 and 2007 that includes information on the channel (bilateral vs. multilateral) and type (cash vs. in-kind) of each...

This paper provides an empirical analysis of the role of intergovernmental relations on a country's effort to enforce the objectives of an international environmental agreement on an open access resource. Intergovernmental interaction allows signatory countries to observe compliance behavior of...

To study whether foreign aid fuels personal, regional and ethnic favoritism, we use satellite data on nighttime light for any region in any aid-recipient country, and we determine for each year and each country the region in which the current political leader was born. Having a panel with 22,850...

We study the effects of economic shocks on civil conflict at the subnational level using a panel data set of 5,689 administrative regions from 53 African countries with yearly observations from 1992 to 2010. We find that economic shocks, measured by nighttime light intensity and instrumented by...