This paper proposes a test of racial bias in capital sentencing based upon patterns of judicial errors in lower courts. We model the behavior of the trial court as minimizing a weighted sum of the probability of sentencing an innocent and that of letting a guilty defendant free. We de?ne racial...

Trafficking of persons is a serious and very complex issue, although too often neglected, in many developing countries, including the Philippines. We make a first attempt to produce empirical research from the angle of development economists to assess the risk factors for entering into...

This paper examines the incomes of individuals who have joined self-help groups in poor neighborhoods of Nairobi. Self-help groups are often advocated as a way of facilitating income pooling. We …nd that incomes are indeed more correlated among individuals in the same group than among...

An extensive literature has studied lobbying by special interest groups. We analyze a novel lobbying channel: lobbying businessmen-politicians through business proxies. When a politician controls a business, firms attempting to curry favors shift their spending towards the politician’s...

We conduct a geographically and temporally disaggregated empirical analysis of civil conflict at the sub-national level in Africa over the period 1997-2011. Our units of observation are cells of 1 degree of latitude by 1 degree of longitude. We exploit within-year variation in the timing of...

This paper investigates the determinants of group membership, and in particular the effect of income inequality on individual incentives to join economic groups. Drawing on a simple model, we show that an increase in inequality has an ambiguous effect and that the type of access rule (open...

The poor favor redistribution and the rich oppose it, but that is not all. The "prospect of upward mobility" (POUM) hypothesis implies that social mobility may make some of today's poor into tomorrow's rich and since redistributive policies do not change often, individual preferences for...

This paper studies both theoretically and empirically the determinants of group formation and of the degree of participation when the population is heterogeneous, both in terms of income and race or ethncity. We are especially interested in whether and how much the degree of heterogeneity in...

This paper studies the impact of public infrastructure on economic perfor-mance. We employ three different methodologies to estimate the returns to public investment. First, we relate growth in total factor productivity to accumulation of public capital. Second, we assess the role of public...

This paper addresses the issue of whether and by how much public capital can enhance economic performance. We apply different methodologies to Italian regional data for the period 1970-1994. The results are presented for Italy as a whole and for different macroregions, and for individual...