Who becomes a top politician in China? We focus on provincial leaders - a pool of candidates for top political office - and examine how their chances of promotion depend on their performance in office and connections with top politicians. Our empirical analysis, based on the curriculum vitae of...

In the book, some 25 authors report on the implementation of the ECHR in their respective countries, including questions of ratification and implementation in law, awareness by legal professionals, inclusion in the curricula of law schools, practice of the courts, cases brought to Strasbourg,...

Private ownership should generally be preferred to public ownership when the incentives to innovate and to contain costs must be strong. In essence, this is the case for capitalism over socialism, explaining the dynamic vitality of free enterprise. The great economists of the 1930s and 1940s...

Growth regressions have provided important insights into the impact of economic reforms on growth in transition economies. Using principal components to decompose reform variables and construct reform clusters, we address unsettled issues such as the importance of sequencing and reform speed....

This study takes advantage of a “natural experiment” to show how changes in political institutions shape politicians’ incentives, and in turn affect important policy outcomes in China. Beijing introduced the mandatory retirement age for provincial leaders in the 1980s, but it did not fully...

The economic growth and the pace of change in Vietnam over the last decade have been impressive. A number of the reform achievements were centred on reforms at central level, e.g. legal and regulatory frameworks, national policy frameworks etc. The number of provinces in Vietnam has grown 60%...

In societies with a political culture of rent-seeking, social norms do not disallow the use of political office for privileged distribution. Societies with such norms tend to be characterized by political insiders and outsiders. We describe the attendant contestability of rents in the two...

We study Pareto improvements whose implementation requires knowledge of only market prices and traded quantities, not utility and demand functions. Quantity stabilization gives agents the right to repeat the net trades they previously conducted, but requires policymakers to have records of those...

We argue that inter-jurisdictional competition in a regionally decentralized authoritarian regime distorts local politicians' incentives in resource allocation among firms from their own city and a competing city. We develop a tournament model of project selection that captures the driving...

This study takes advantage of a “natural experiment” to show how changes in political institutions shape politicians’ incentives, and in turn affect important policy outcomes in China. Beijing introduced the mandatory retirement age for provincial leaders in the 1980s, but it did not fully...