Does democracy help babies survive in sub-Saharan Africa? By using retrospective fertility surveys conducted in 28 African countries, I compare the survival of infants born to the same mother before and after democratization to identify the effect of democracy. In measuring democracy, I adopt a...

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...

This paper develops a new approach to studying how electoral bias in favor of one party due to the pattern of districting affects policy choice. We tie a commonly used measure of bias to the theory of party compe- tition and show how this affects policy choice. The usefulness of the approach is...

How and whether judges should be held accountable is a key issue in the design of a legal system. Thirty-seven of the forty-eight continental states use some method of judicial selection which involves a direct role for citizens in selecting or re-appointing the judiciary. We identify two...

This paper discusses a theoretical framework to study the issues of competition and incentives without relying on the standard profit-oriented “market” model in the context of the debates about public service reform in the UK. It uses the idea that the production of public services coheres...

A rich array of institutional diversity makes the United States an excellent place to study the relationship between political institutions and public policy outcomes. This essay has three main aims. First, it reviews existing empirical evidence on the relationship between institutional rules,...

This paper develops an approach to studying how bias in favor of one party due to the pattern of electoral districting affects policy choice. We tie a commonly used measure of electoral bias to the theory of party competition and show how this affects party strategy in theory. The usefulness of...

Until recently, most policy debates on pensions — especially in Europe — focused on public responsibilities and the difficulties that many publicly funded schemes have in meeting their obligations. However, recent events, not least declines in stock markets, have increased the salience of...

This paper uses a unique data set on more than 600,000 mortgage contracts to estimate a credit supply function which allows for risk-heterogeneity. Non-linearity is modelled using quantile regressions. We propose an instrumental variable approach in which changes in the tax treatment of housing...