Why do elected officials often suffer from political paralysis and fail to implement the best policies available? This paper considers a new yet intuitive explanation that focuses on the quality of the politicians competing to replace the incumbent. The key insight is that a 'good' incumbent...

Why do elected officials often suffer from political paralysis and fail to implement the best policies available? This paper considers a new yet intuitive explanation that focuses on the quality of the politicians competing to replace the incumbent. The key insight is that a `good' incumbent...

This paper provides empirical evidence that campaign contributions arestrongly associated with market expectations of future firm-specific political favors,including preferential access to external financing. Using a novel dataset, we find thatfirms in Brazil providing contributions in the 1998...

Successive governments in Nigeria have introduced reforms aimed at improving the efficiency and effectiveness of the civil service. Still, the service remains inefficient and incapable of reforming itself, let alone the rest of the economy. Corruption has become an endemic feature of public...

This paper shows that cross country differences in the generosity and the quality of the welfare state are associated with differences in the trustworthiness of their citizens. We show that generous, transparent and efficient welfare states in Scandinavian countries are based on the civicness of...

This study provides the first systematic measure of bribery using micro-level data on reported earnings, household spending and asset holdings. We use the compensating differential framework and the estimated sectoral gap in reported earnings and expenditures to identify the size of unobserved...

In this paper, I analyze how corruption in one country may be affected by its neighbors' corruption. It seeks to explain why corruption is perpetuating in large geographical areas populated by developing countries despite anticorruption efforts made in the single country. In our empirical...

The quot;first wavequot; of donor sponsored anti-corruption programmes usefully focused on elaborating recommendations for parliamentarians or tried to train them (develop human capital) in anti-corruption. Now it time for these programmes to take into account parliamentarian incentives to adopt...

This paper examines the consequences of powerful political connections for local governments. We find that governments located within the constituencies of, and thus connected to, powerful congressional members reduce their stewardship over public resources. Using plausibly-exogenous declines in...

This paper examines the consequences of powerful political connections for local governments. We find that governments located within the constituencies of, and thus connected to, powerful congressional members reduce their stewardship over public resources. Using plausibly-exogenous declines in...