In this paper, the authors examine the political economy drivers of the variation in agricultural protection, both across countries and within countries over time. The paper starts by listing the key insights provided by both the theoretical and empirical literature on the political economy of...

The paper presents some empirical puzzles in the relationship between bureaucratic wages and corruption levels, and attempts to reconcile them within a general equilibrium framework that leads to multiple equilibria in the incidence of corruption. In the presence of such multiple equilibria, the...

We draw upon recent advances that combine causal inferences with machine learning, to show that poverty is the key income distribution measure that matters for development outcomes. In a predictive framework, we first show that LASSO chooses only the headcount measure of poverty from 37 income...

In this paper, we present two alternative models of trade and unemployment, in which unemployment is generated through a search mechanism. The basic framework of the first model is Ricardian in that the only factor of production is labor and trade is based on relative technological differences....

In this paper, we create alternative measures of political instability, which capture movements only from dictatorship to democracy and vice versa (consistent with the recent theoretical work by Acemoglu and Robinson) but, unlike older, well known measures do not capture government changes that...