We use survey responses by firms to examine the firm-level determinants and effects of political influence, their perception of corruption and prevalence of bribe paying. We find that: (a) measures of political influence and corruption/bribes are uncorrelated at the firm level; (b) firms that...

In the last decades, NGOs have become an important participant in the work of political organizations (e.g., national authorities, the EU or the UN). This development brings many opportunities and also some challenges, including discourse failure which is one of the topics discussed in this...

We suggest a novel perspective on the relationship between the stringency of environmental policies and foreign direct investment (FDI). We develop a political economy model with imperfect product market competition where local and foreign firms jointly lobby the local government for a favorable...

After the global financial crisis, systemic risk regulation has taken center stage. Many consider hedge funds a potential threat to financial stability. Regulating hedge funds, however, is necessarily a transnational challenge because no national government alone can effectively control the...

We study the role of an enforcer in the effectiveness of selective incentives in solving the collective action problem when groups take part in a contest. Cost functions exhibit constant elasticity of marginal effort costs. If prize valuations are homogeneous, our source of heterogeneity induces...

Using data for the 2005-2017 period, we consider the effects of resource rents on the sub-components of Freedom House's measures of Political Rights and Civil Liberties. Higher resource rents lead to a deterioration in Political Pluralism and Participation, but do not affect other...

In this paper, we study how policies limiting the spending capacity of local governments may lead to a reduction in corruption. We exploit the extension of one such policy, the Domestic Stability Pact (DSP), to Italian municipalities with less than 5,000 inhabitants that occurred in 2013. Using...

In this paper, we study how policies limiting the spending capacity of local governments may lead to a reduction in corruption. We exploit the extension of one such policy, the Domestic Stability Pact (DSP), to Italian municipalities with less than 5,000 inhabitants that occurred in 2013. Using...

We ask whether, as many seem to think, corruption worsens, and judicial accountability improves, inequality, and investigate this empirically using data from 145 countries 1960–2014. We relate perceived corruption and de facto judicial accountability to gross-income inequality and consumption...