The paper provides a systematic and quantitative review of the empirical evidence on the effects of development aid on democracy and governance. We find that aid has had, on average, a zero or negative effect on democracy, except that it has had a positive effect on democratization in European...

A sizable empirical literature examines government fiscal interactions. However, the empirical evidence is very mixed. We apply meta-regression analysis to quantify the size of inter-jurisdictional fiscal interactions and to explain the heterogeneity in empirical estimates. Several robust...

Religiosity is defined as the importance of religion in all aspects of life. The definition is operationalized into a robust measure by aggregating 14 items from the World Values Surveys. Religiosity falls by 50 % when countries pass through the transition from being underdeveloped to becoming...

The literature on electional cycles is discussed in the light of the empirical findings by, in particular, the author. Two basically different types of explanations of such cycles are compared: (α) explanations based on the maximizing behavior of governments aiming at re-election. (β)...

The path of consumer price rises is compared with data for the incidence of political change and the frequency of military regimes from 1946 to 1984 for the following countries: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Peru, Uruguay and Venezuela. A highly significant connection between the...

Recent aid effectiveness literature centers on two competing models from the family of conditional models: The Good Policy Model, where the key feature is policy times aid, and the Medicine Model, where it is aid squared. Both models were reached on a sample of 1/3 of the available data. The...

VP-functions explain the support for the government at votes and polls by economic and political variables. Most studies analyze macro time series. The authors also cover studies of individual voters, socioeconomic groups, and regional cross-sections. The theory starts from the responsibility...

The cost of producing the same good often differs substantially for public and private producers. We investigate the effect of organization in a case where the production technology is simple: The cleaning of Danish schools. Three forms of organization are used: Decentral municipal, central...