executives instead favor patronage -political discretion- in public employment. This paper proposes and tests an original theory … to explain when executives forsake patronage for merit. The theory exploits exogenous variation in the institutional … comparison of reforms in Paraguay, the Dominican Republic and the United States validates the theory. How patronage states are …

these policies commonly relies on information provided by a bureaucracy. Environmental bureaucrats often have a political …

The topic of corruption has recently attracted a great deal of attention, yet there is still a lack of micro level … empirical evidence regarding the determinants of corruption. Furthermore, the present literature has not investigated the … effects of political interest on corruption despite the interesting potential of this link. We address these deficiencies by …