In 2008, an opposition coalition defeated the Paraguayan Colorado Party, which had been in power for 61 years, including 35 years of the longest dictatorship in South America. Using data of all the public procurement transactions from 2004 through 2011 and the political connections of the 700...

Abundant empirical evidence links well-functioning institutions and good governance to better economic and social outcomes. It is thus an important challenge to determine which conjunction of factors produces better institutions. Along this line, the objective of this paper is twofold. First, it...

This paper studies the impact of the rapid expansion of the Brazilian road network, which occurred from the 1960s to the 2000s, on the growth and spatial allocation of population and economic activity across the country's municipalities. It addresses the problem of endogeneity in infrastructure...

Since the 1980s, privatization of formerly state-owned firms has been extensively implemented by governments across Latin America. Despite the fact that most evaluations of the process fail to find significant adverse efficiency and welfare effects, there has been a strong surge in public...

This paper applies two distinct approaches—growth regressions and growth accounting—to analyze the link between infrastructure, growth, and productivity in developing Asian countries. The main conclusion is that a number of countries in developing Asia have significantly improved their basic...

A standard view holds that removing barriers to entry and improving judicial enforcement would reduce informality and boost investment and growth. We show, however, that this conclusion may not hold in countries with a concentrated bank- ing sector or with low financial openness. When the formal...