We analyze when, and to a lesser extent how, privatization occurred in a group of thirty-five low or middle-income developing countries. The theoretical perspective turns on the concept of net political benefits, which in our model is the primary determinant of privatization policies....

In this paper, we assume that redistribution modifies the community structure of an economy and generates both intra and intergenerational mobility. In a world in which neighbourhood attributes and family backgrounds are important to determine the investment effort and the productivity of...

The aim of this paper is to provide an assessment of the potential for resource curse in the renewable energy sector. Taking a political economy approach, we analyze the link between public support schemes for renewable energy and the potential scope for rent seeking and corruption. The insights...

This paper presents theoretical and empirical evidence on the nexus between corruption and democracy. We establish a political economy model where the effect of democracy on corruption is conditional on income distribution and property rights protection. Our empirical analysis with...

Data on the growth performances of countries with similar comparative (dis)advantage and political institutions reveal a striking variation across world regions. While some former autocracies such as the East Asian growth miracles have done remarkably well, others such as the Latin American...

In this review we synthetize the existing contributions that use econometric approaches to examine the influence of institutions and governance on environmental policy, environmental outcomes, and investments. The paper describes how the relationship between institutions and various response...

Natural resources are generally associated to negative effects on the political environment of a country. This paper explores the impact that oil revenues have on the establishment of a given political system. Based on previous literature, a political economy perspective is employed. A simple...

The theory of international environmental agreements overwhelmingly assumes that governments engage as unitary agents. Each government makes choices based on benefits and costs that are simple national aggregates, and similarly on a single set of national-level motivations, together drawing a...

We model a bipartite network in which links connect agents with public goods. Agents play a voluntary contribution game in which they decide how much to contribute to each public good they are connected to. We show that the problem of finding a Nash equilibrium can be posed as a non-linear...

Ecological reserve networks are an important strategy for conserving biodiversity. One approach to selecting reserves is to use optimization algorithms that maximize an ecological objective function subject to a total reserve area constraint. Under this approach, economic factors such as...