Why have anti-corruption efforts often failed? Current thinking on corruption has largely overlooked the profound implications of its contested nature, which paradoxically makes it an effective yet highly dysfunctional 'tool of government.' As a tool of government, it helps execute policies and...

We address the issue of whether public infrastructure play an important role in determining factor productivity in Italy, and we show that the evidence is mixed. Public capital is significant in explaining output in most cases. However, when the attention is drawn on the long-run properties of...

This paper addresses the question of whether trade interdependencies are significant in explaining the international synchronization of business cycles, or "international business cycles". Using an econometric framework that combines the concept of separate cointegration (Granger an Konishi,...

Standard crossnational measures of corruption draw on information collected through surveys. We propose a novel alternative measure based on objective data, namely, the difference between a measure of the physical quantities of public infrastructure and a measure of the value of public capital...