Governments can significantly reduce earthquake mortality by implementing and enforcing quake-proof construction regulation. The authors examine why many governments do not. Contrary to intuition, controlling for the strength and location of actual earthquakes, mortality is lower in countries...

Governments can significantly reduce earthquake mortality by implementing and enforcing quake-proof construction regulation. The authors examine why many governments do not. Contrary to intuition, controlling for the strength and location of actual earthquakes, mortality is lower in countries...

Contrary to the belief of many, tax competition did not undermine the foundations of the welfare state and did not even abolish the taxation of capital. Instead, tax competition caused governments to shift the tax burden from capital to labor, thereby increasing income inequality in liberal...

The paper develops a political economic argument for the recently observed inverse u-shaped relation between the level of democracy and economic performance. A model is constructed that shows why and how political participation influences the spending behavior of opportunistic governments that...

The notion of contagion has changed the way scientists perceive financial crises, causing heated debate on the political economy of crisis intervention. Based on a formal model that shows how a financial crisis can escalate and spread contagiously, this article analyzes game-theoretically how a...

Summary Governments can significantly reduce earthquake mortality by enforcing quake-proof construction regulation. We examine why many governments do not. First, mortality is lower in countries with higher earthquake propensity, where the payoffs to investments in mortality prevention are...

This report shows that in MENA, policies that lower competition and create an unleveled playing field abound and constrain private sector job creation. These policies take different forms across countries and sectors but share several common features: they limit free-entry in the domestic...

A booming literature has argued that mission-based motives are a central feature of mission-oriented labor markets. This paper shifts the focus to task-based motivation and finds that it yields significantly more effort than mission-based motivation. Moreover, in the presence of significant task...

This paper uses an original database of 469 politically connected firms under the Mubarak regime in Egypt to explore the economic effects of close state-business relations. Previous research has shown that political connections are lucrative. The paper addresses several questions raised by this...