What accounts for cross-national variation in political clientelism? We consider two prominent explanations, economic wealth and state capacity, and test them on a new dataset of political clientelism. Although economic wealth is a strong predictor of contemporaneous clientelism, especially for...

We exploit differences in casualties sustained in pre-modern wars to estimate the impact of fiscal capacity on economic performance. In the past, states fought different amounts of external conflicts, of various lengths and magnitudes. To raise the revenues to wage wars, states made fiscal...