We study the wealth accumulation of Indian parliamentarians using public disclosures required of all candidates since 2003. Annual asset growth of winners is on average 3 to 6 percentage points higher than runners-up. By performing a within-constituency comparison where both runner-up and winner...

This paper examines how sales force impact competition and equilibrium prices in the context of a privatized pension market. We use detailed administrative data on fund manager choices and worker characteristics at the inception of Mexico's privatized social security system, where fund managers...

We have conducted the first survey on management practices in transition countries. We found that Central Asian transition countries, such as Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, have on average very poor management practices. Their average scores are below emerging countries such as Brazil, China and...

We develop a dynamic game to explore the interaction between regulation and private policies, such as self-regulation by firms and activism. Without a public regulator, the possibility of self-regulation is bad for the firm, but good for activists who are willing to maintain a costly boycott to...

This paper studies the urban land market in China in 2003--2007. In China, all urban land is owned by the state. Leasehold use rights for land for (re)development are sold by city governments and are a key source of city revenue. Leasehold sales are viewed as a major venue for corruption,...

This paper addresses a basic yet unresolved question: Do claims on private assets provide sufficient liquidity for an efficient functioning of the productive sector? Or does the State have a role in creating liquidity and regulating it either through adjustments in the stock of government...

Using a newly constructed complete monthly panel of private and public state prisons, we ask whether private prisons impact judges' sentencing decisions in their state. We employ two identification strategies, a difference-in-difference strategy comparing court-pairs that straddle state-borders,...

We track firms at birth and compare the growth pattern of IPO firms and their birth-matched counterparts. Firms that are larger at birth with faster initial growth are more likely to attain a larger size later in life and go public. Firms in the top percentile of predicted propensity to go...

We use responses to a survey and experiment with participants in Mexico's privatized social security system to examine how financial literacy impacts workers' choice behavior and how simplifying information on management fees may increase measures of price elasticity sensitivity among the...