Showing 1 - 10 of 260
The construction of large dams is one of the most costly and controversial forms of public infrastructure investment in developing countries, but little is known about their impact. This paper studies the productivity and distributional effects of large dams in India. To account for endogenous...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005088856
Rosenstein-Rodan (1943) and others posit that rapid development requires a 'big push' -- the coordinated rapid growth of diverse complementary industries, and suggests a role for government in providing such coordination. We argue that Japan's zaibatsu, or pyramidal business groups, provided...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005579952
The Nigerian banking system was in crisis for much of the 1990's and early 2000's. The reforms of 2005 were ambitious in simultaneously attempting to address safety, soundness, and accessibility. This paper uses published and new survey data through 2008 to investigate whether bank consolidation...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10008871136
A group of agents wants to reform the status quo if and only if this is Pareto improving. Agents have private information and may have common or private objectives, which creates a tension between information aggregation and minority protection. We analyze a simple voting system - majority rule...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10010951157
We study the joint dynamics of economic and political change. Predictions of the simple model that we formulate in the paper get considerable support in a panel of data on political regimes and GDP per capita for about 150 countries over 150 years. Democratic capital -- measured by a nation's...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005774639
Using data on elections to the United States House of Representatives (1946-1998), this paper exploits a quasi-experiment generated by the electoral system in order to determine if political incumbency provides an electoral advantage - an implicit first-order prediction of principal-agent...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005774786
This paper develops a model of evolving standards for academic publishing. It is motivated by the increasing tendency of academic journals to require multiple revisions of articles and by changes in the content of articles. Papers are modeled as varying along two quality dimensions: q and r. The...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005777823
In order to enforce a collective choice to allocate resource to guarding against predators producers must subject themselves to the state's sovereign power to tax and to spend. But these sovereign powers in hand the state can exploit the producers by taxing and spending for its" own purposes....
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005828776
collective decision, or in other words, the voting system must be self-enforcing. The model yields unanimity as the optimal …
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005829217
. Preliminary empirical evidence based on cross-country data find a number of correlations consistent with the theory. …
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005829304