Most normative studies on child labor arrive at the conclusion that child labor is detrimental to social welfare. Child labor is, however, still prevalent in many developing countries even though in many of these countries it is forbidden by law. In this paper we develop a political-economic...

This paper considers terrorism as an extortion activity. It uses tools from the theory of extortion and from conflict theory to describe how terrorism works, why terrorism is a persistent phenomenon, why terrorism is a violent phenomenon, and how retaliation affects the outcome. The analysis...

Taking a political economy perspective this paper proposes an alternative carbon abatement policy instrument with significant advantages over existing policy instruments. The key feature of the proposed carbon securities is that they entitle their owners to a fixed proportion of ex ante unknown...

This paper argues that migration could trigger institutional development in the sending country. It is shown that the existence of rent-seeking institutions not only hinders the adoption of a more efficient technology, it also reinforces itself; while the possibility of migrating to a more...

Contract enforcement does not only affect single transactions but the market as a whole. We compare alternative institutions that allocate enforcement rights to the different parties to a credit transaction: either lenders, borrowers, or judges. Despite all parties having incentives to enforce...

The changes to the intelligence community and its congressional overseers recommended by the 9/11 and WMD Commissions, both those implemented and those not adopted, raise fundamental questions of administrative and constitutional law. These questions cut to the heart of the federal government's...

This paper introduces preliminary evidence from a cross-country database of policy characteristics and potential uses of that database. While most databases have emphasized either the content of policies (e.g., size of government deficits) or countries’ formal institutions (e.g., political...

The risk of political predation impedes the achievement of economic prosperity. In this paper, we analyze how the risk of predation evolves in different political regimes. Formally, we look at the interaction between a government and citizens in which, in each period, the government has an...

This paper studies the effect of political regime transitions on public policy using a dataset on global agricultural distortions over 50 years (including data from 74 developing and developed countries over the period 1955-2005). We employ both difference-in-differences regressions and...

The current study attempts to understand the relationships among Environmental Quality (EQ), Human Development (HD) and political and governance regime in a cross-country framework. The underlying hypothesis is that in addition to income, as reflected from the literature on Environmental Kuznets...