This paper evaluates Kenya's food price crisis over 2002 - 11 using a political economy approach. Kenya's food prices have been high and volatile relative to world food prices. Moreover, domestic food markets are highly integrated while about 30 per cent of the changes in world market prices are...

Conviction rates in Japan exceed 99 percent -- why? On the one hand, because Japanese prosecutors are badly understaffed they may prosecute only their strongest cases and present judges only with the most obviously guilty defendants. On the other, because Japanese judges can be reassigned by the...

In this paper, we develop a simple model of the rights a government provides its citizenry. Rights are treated as public goods and taken as primitives in agents utility functions; each agent has preferences over the entire policy vector. We model the interaction among citi-zens and the...

How is economic policy made? In this paper we study a key determinant of the answer to the question: lobbying by fi…rms. Estimating a binary choice model of …firm behavior, we fi…nd signifi…cant evidence for the idea that barriers to entry induce persistence in lobbying. The existence of...

Donor agencies invest considerable financial and human resources to evaluate the outcome of their development activities. To derive institutional conditions conducive to an efficient use of these resources, we develop a multi-level principal-agent model focusing on the various interests of the...

In this paper, we examine how the institutional design affects the outcome of bank bailout decisions. In the German savings bank sector, distress events can be resolved by local politicians or a state-level association. We show that decisions by local politicians with close links to the bank are...

Formal conceptions of state capacity have mostly focused on indirect measures of state capacity – by, for instance, using the state's fiscal or extractive capacity as a proxy for its overall capacity. Yet, this input or extractive view of state capacity falls short, especially since...

This paper identifies eight political economy factors that influenced governments' policy choices during the most recent global food price crisis. To explain the variety of responses and the policy failures, a framework is proposed that locates policies along the twin dimensions of unitary vs....

Promises are prevalent in many competitive environments, but promise keeping is often difficult to observe. Do promises still offer an opportunity to honor future obligations, if promise keeping is unobservable? Focusing on campaign promises, we study the value of transparency. We show how...

Florian Dorn prepared this study during his doctoral studies at the Ludwig-Maximilians University of Munich (LMU). The study was completed in September 2020 and accepted as doctoral thesis by the Department of Economics. This dissertation contributes to the empirics of public economics and...