Despite being a fixture of everyday life in the Arab world, wasta, which may be thought of as special influence by members of the same group or tribe, has received little attention from social scientists. Our casual empiricism suggests that wasta is an important determinant of how economic...

Indonesia’s 1999 decentralization law gave local governments in Indonesia an unprecedented opportunity to adopt pro-development policies. We estimate the effect of decentralization (enacted in 2001) on national economic performance using a synthetic case control methodology. Our results...

This paper examines how a million Manchus, as a dominant minority, partly relied on a cross-ethnic personnel strategy to rule over 100 million Han Chinese for 267 years. Under this strategy, Han elites were appointed to handle daily administrative issues, on top of whom Manchu superiors were...

Economic sanctions are intended to cause pain to the target country or, in the case of smart sanctions, to particular individuals or groups. Over the years, two basic views have emerged on the ethics of employing economic sanctions. One view applies utilitarian ethics to justify sanctions while...

Institutional Change is an interactive process that results from the social interactions of economic actors. Several perspectives like ideology, efficiency, or distribution etc. are relevant in studying institutional change. In this paper, the distributive consideration is analyzed and an...

The aim of this paper is to provide a specific point of view on the protests that have characterized the Arab countries from December 2010 and are still going on. To understand some of the reasons behind these events, I propose a sequential game with asymmetric information on the likelihood of...

We analyze the probability of an incumbents winning in the consecutive election, under the assumption that all individual candidates are equally likely (i.e. random selection) when that they are from the same party. We are trying to analyze the probability of winning by ruling party (i.e. the...

This paper proposes the following mechanism whereby polarization of beliefs could eliminate political gridlock instead of intensifying disagreement: the expectation of political payoffs from being proven correct by a policy failure could drive decision makers who do not believe in the new policy...

Weak states hinder economic development. This paper investigates and compares the causal impacts of three factors on the development and intensification of historical state capacity: foreign wars, hydraulic public goods, and economic shocks. I construct a novel panel dataset of historical...