To study whether foreign aid fuels personal, regional and ethnic favoritism, we use satellite data on nighttime light for any region in any aid-recipient country, and we determine for each year and each country the region in which the current political leader was born. Having a panel with 22,850...

We study the effects of economic shocks on civil conflict at the subnational level using a panel dataset of 5689 administrative regions from 53 African countries with yearly observations from 1992 to 2010. We find that economic shocks, measured by nighttime light intensity and instrumented by...

To study whether foreign aid fuels personal, regional and ethnic favoritism, we use satellite data on nighttime light for any region in any aid-recipient country, and we determine for each year and each country the region in which the current political leader was born. Having a panel with 22,850...

We investigate the prevalence and determinants of ethnic favoritism, i.e., preferential public policies targeted at the political leader’s ethnic group. We construct a panel dataset of 2,022 ethnographic regions from 139 countries with annual observations from 1992 to 2012, and use nighttime...

In a moral hazard model with relationship-speci?c investment (?hay?) and limited liability (no ?stick?), we compare two institutional regimes: one without, and one with, ex-post incentives (?carrot?). We examine the welfare implications of introducing ?carrots?. We use this model to analyze...

We focus on a relatively neglected area of the tax-compliance literature in economics, the behaviour of firms. We examine the impact of alternative audit rules on receipts from a tax on profits in the context of strategic interdependence of firms. The enforcement policy can have an effect on...

Firms are usually better informed than tax authorities about market conditions and the potential profits of competitors. They may try to exploit this situation by underreporting their own taxable profits. The tax authority could offset firms' informational advantage by adopting "smarter" audit...

We derive necessary and sufficient conditions for data sets composed of state-contingent prices and consumption to be consistent with two prominent models of decision making under uncertainty: variational preferences and smooth ambiguity. The revealed preference conditions for subjective...

We focus on a relatively neglected area of the tax-compliance literature ineconomics, the behaviour of firms. We examine the impact of alternativeaudit rules on receipts from a tax on profits in the context of strategicinter-dependence of firms. In the market firms may compete in terms ofeither...

This paper discusses the problem of crowding out of insurance by co-existing governmental relief programs—the so-called ‘charity hazard’—in the context of different institutional schemes of governmental disaster relief in Austria and Germany. We test empirically whether an assured...