We argue that societies sometimes choose not to enforce the law to gain “flexibility”. Especially developing countries face a dilemma between discretion and commitment to only partially-contingent rules. Rules are good for incentives, but discretion may be more “flexible”. We embed this...

Despite welfare and poverty-reducing benefits for recipient households, remittance inflows have been shown to entail macroeconomic challenges; producing Dutch Disease-type effects through their upward (appreciation) pressure on real exchange rates, reducing the quality of institutions, delaying...

In this paper I investigate the trade-off a legislature faces in the choice of instruments to ensure accountability by bureaucrats with private information. The legislature can either design a state-contingent incentive scheme or “menu law” to elicit the bureau's information or it can simply...