Are politically connected firms more likely to evade taxes? This paper presents evidence suggesting firms owned by President Ben Ali and his family were more prone to evade import tariffs. During Ben Ali?s reign, evasion gaps, defined as the difference between the value of exports to Tunisia...

Professional civil service recruitment is a core component of governance for development, as it is necessary for ensuring the capacity of civil servants, service delivery, fiscal sustainability, and proper salary management. Through an ambitious mixed method approach, this study seeks to provide...

Citizens in developing countries support politicians who provide patronage or clientelist benefits, such as government jobs and gifts at the time of elections. Can access to mass media that broadcasts public interest messages shift citizens' preferences for such benefits? This paper examines the...

This paper examines the relationship between entry regulation and the business interests of former President Ben Ali's family using firm-level data from Tunisia. Connected firms account for a disproportionate share of aggregate employment, output and profits, especially in sectors subject to...

This paper uses unique survey data to provide, for the first time in the literature, direct evidence that vote buying in poor economies is associated with lower provision of public services that disproportionately benefit the poor. Various features of the data and the institutional context allow...

Business and politicians' interaction is pervasive but has mostly been analyzed with a binary approach, i.e. either a firm is connected to a politician or not. Yet the network dimensions of such connections are ubiquitous. This paper uses use a unique data set for seven economies that documents...

This paper presents new evidence that cronyism reduces long-term economic growth by discouraging firms' innovation activities. The analysis is based on novel establishment survey data from The Arab Republic of Egypt which provides information on establishments' political connections, their...

This study combines firm-level data and data on politically exposed people to explore correlation between firms' political connectedness and their economic performance in Ukraine. First, it estimates the share of politically connected firms in Ukraine's economy. Second, the study looks at how...

The authors show that exported products exit the US market sooner if they violate the Heckscher-Ohlin notion of comparative advantage. Crucially, this pattern is stronger when exporting country has a well-developed banking system, measured by a high ratio of bank credit over the GDP. Banks thus...