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We posit the problem of an autocrat who has to allocate access to the executive positions in his inner circle and define the career profile of his own insiders. Statically, granting access to an executive post to a more experienced subordinate increases political returns to the post, but is more...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012458450
Motivated by a novel stylized fact - countries with isolated capital cities display worse quality of governance - we provide a framework of endogenous institutional choice based on the idea that elites are constrained by the threat of rebellion, and that this threat is rendered less effective by...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012459634
Generally speaking, better educated countries have better governments, an empirical regularity that holds in both dictatorships and democracies. We suggest that a possible reason for this fact is that educated people are more likely to complain about misconduct by government officials, so that,...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012460540
Although most of the political-economy literature blames inefficient policies on institutions or politicians' motives to supply bad policy, voters may themselves be partially responsible by demanding bad policy. In this paper, we posit that voters may systematically err when assessing potential...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012455764
As Africa's role on the global stage is rising, so does the need to understand the shadow of history on the continent …'s economy and polity. We discuss recent works that shed light on Africa's colonial and precolonial legacies. The emerging corpus … Africa's post-independence maladies, we first review works that uncover the lasting legacies of colonial investments in …
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012480929
systems. After showing that the intensity with which people were enslaved and exported from Africa during the 1400 - 1900 …
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012453911
effect on income. However, in Africa rugged terrain afforded protection to those being raided during the slave trades. Since … the slave trades retarded subsequent economic development, in Africa ruggedness has also had a historical indirect … for Africa the indirect positive effect dominates the direct negative effect. Looking within Africa, we also provide …
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012463730
Can part of Africa's current underdevelopment be explained by its slave trades? To explore this question, I use data … exported from each country during Africa's slave trades. I find a robust negative relationship between the number of slaves …
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012465283
We examine the long-run consequences of ethnic partitioning, a neglected aspect of the Scramble for Africa, and uncover …
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012461037
India seems to have followed an idiosyncratic pattern of development, certainly compared to other fast-growing Asian economies. While the emphasis on services rather than manufacturing has been widely noted, within manufacturing India has emphasized skill-intensive rather than labor-intensive...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012466646