This study investigates how government ideology matters for the success of World Bank economic policy loans, which typically support market-liberalizing reforms. A simple model predicts that World Bank staff will invest more effort in designing an economic policy loan when faced with a left-wing...

For the past several years, we have presented and published studies based on postal related data, from postmaster cash books and the Official Register, where we use postmaster salary data as a measure of local, highly disaggregate proxies for general economic activity at town and village level....

This paper develops a dynamic framework to analyze the political sustainability of economic reforms in developing countries. First, we demonstrate that economic reforms that are proceeding successfully may run into a political impasse, with the reform's initial success having a negative impact...