We present a model of political selection in which voters elect a president from a set of candidates. We assume that some of the candidates are benevolent and that all voters prefer a benevolent president, i.e. a president who serves the public interest. Yet, political selection may fail in our...

This paper uses five waves of the Vietnam Access to Resources Household Survey (VARHS) to analyse land issues in Viet Nam from a number of different angles. The VARHS provides panel data at plot as well as household level and I use this rich data set to present descriptive results on...

This paper exploits five waves of the Vietnam Access to Resources Household Survey (VARHS) to investigate issues of social and political capital in rural Viet Nam. I analyse membership of the Communist Party, 'mass organizations' (Farmers' Union, Women's Union, etc.) and other voluntary...

We present results from a repeated public goods experiment where subjects choose by vote one of two sanctioning schemes: peer-to-peer (informal) or centralized (formal). We introduce, in some treatments, a moderate amount of noise (a 10 percent probability that a contribution is reported...

We use household survey data to investigate the effects of formal, private property rights to agricultural land on agricultural investment, land valuation and access to credit in Tanzania. Results show that while there are no detectable effects of formal, private land property rights (written...

Single-party political systems exist in a number of countries, such as China and Viet Nam. In these countries, party membership is potentially an important source of economic and social status. This paper investigates these effects and the mechanisms behind them. In particular, we use household-...

We examine the effects of randomly introduced economic inequality on voluntary co- operation and whether this relationship is influenced by the quality of local institutions, as proxied by corruption. We use representative data from a large-scale lab-in-the-field public goods experiment with...

We examine the effects of randomly introduced economic inequality on voluntary cooperation, and whether this relationship is influenced by the quality of local institutions, as proxied by corruption. We use representative data from a large-scale lab-in-the-field public goods experiment with over...

Do democratically chosen rules lead to more cooperation and, hence, higher efficiency, than imposed rules? To discuss when such a "dividend of democracy" obtains, we review experimental studies in which material incentives remain stacked against cooperation (i.e., free-riding incentives prevail)...

Using survey data from rural Vietnam, this paper documents a statistically significant, positive effect of self-employment in farming on subjective well-being. Wage workers are less happy than farmers across a range of different types of wage jobs. These results suggest that structural...