The empirical literature on institutions and development has been challenged on grounds of reverse causality, measurement error in institutional indicators, and heterogeneity. This paper uses firm-level data across countries to confront these challenges. Instead of analyzing ultimate outcomes,...

Power pools constitute a set of sometimes complex institutional arrangements for efficiency-enhancing coordination among power systems. Where such institutional arrangements do not exist, there still can be scope for voluntary electricity-sharing agreements among power systems. This paper uses a...

This paper uses survey data from 120 developing countries to compare the role of institutions with firm characteristics at the time of creation of the firm in explaining the size, growth, and productivity of firms over their lifecycle. The study finds that firm-level characteristics have...

The economic thinking around the role of agriculture for development has evolved since the 1950s. Over the past decades, the agriculture sector has been rediscovered as a sector with great potential for triggering growth, reducing poverty and inequality, providing food security, and delivering...

Much of the academic debate on the effectiveness of foreign aid is centered on the relationship between aid and growth. Different aid-growth studies find conflicting results: aid promotes growth everywhere; aid has a zero or negative impact on growth everywhere; or the effect of aid on growth...

This paper assesses the effect of institutional quality on research and development (R&D) expenditures in developing countries. The paper finds that the risk of expropriation and the rule of law are correlated with R&D expenditures. Since both institutional variables increase as institutional...

Groundwater is a vital yet threatened resource in much of South Asia. This paper develops a model of groundwater transactions under payoff uncertainty arising from unpredictable fluctuations in groundwater availability during the agricultural dry season. The model highlights the trade-off...

Do incentives matter beyond the information conveyed by pay-for-performance contracts? Does loss framing matter? And do incomplete contracts generate spillovers on unincentivized tasks? This study reports on a framed field experiment with 1,363 maternity care workers in 691 primary health...

This paper constructs a large contract-level data set to examine factors that trigger breach of foreign investment contracts. Similar to the case of outright expropriation, political regime type is an important determinant of breach of contract. Furthermore, although investors' bargaining power...