This paper empirically analyzes how political factors affect the deployment of renewable energy (RE) sources and compares it to other economic, energy and environmental drivers that have received greater attention in the literature so far. The sample encompasses the EU countries bound to attain...

This paper examines the relationship between corruption and infrastructure at both the country and regional level using the World Bank’s Enterprise Surveys data. A statistically significant and considerable relationship is established between the measure of corruption in the macro data and the...

This paper studies the relevance of the different factors that influence, at the territorial level, efficiency in the market for public infrastructures in Italy.

Are ostensibly demand-driven public programs less susceptible to political clientelism even when private goods are allocated? We investigate this conjecture using expenditure data at the local level from India's National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme. By focusing on one state where...

We were asked to discuss specific methodological approaches to evaluating three hypothetical interventions. This article uses this forum to discuss three misperceptions about randomized trials. First, nobody argues that randomized trials are appropriate in all settings, and for all questions....

During the first half of the 1990s a pool of Italian judges carried out an investigation, named Mani Pulite (literally clean hands), that led many public officials to be prosecuted and convicted because of corruption. We show that Mani Pulite broke down the perverselinkage between corruption and...

This paper presents a new model of political competition where candidates belong to factions. Before elections, factions compete to direct local public goods to their local constituencies. The model of factional competition delivers a rich set of implications relating the internal organization...

This paper focuses on the question whether public infrastructure capital matters for labor productivity in China, both over time and across regions. It finds that public infrastructure is a significant determinant of variations in labor productivity across provinces, but the contribution of...

This paper develops an endogenous growth model in which the government finances its public investment using both income taxation and seigniorage. Arguments presented in this paper show that public investment financed by seigniorage gradually pulls up the growth rate of consumption and overshoots...