This paper argues that in weak states, leaders whose hold on power is secured by the public fortune have turned to the use of sovereign wealth funds (SWFs), especially unofficial SWFs, to cement their hold on power. Unofficial SWFs are private funds created from resource rents with the...

This paper investigates, both theoretically and empirically, the role of factional competition and local accountability in explaining the enormous but puzzling county-level variations in development performance in Fujian province of China. When the Communist armies took over Fujian from the...

We present a model of political selection in which voters elect a president from a set of candidates. We assume that some of the candidates are benevolent and that all voters prefer a benevolent president, i.e. a president who serves the public interest. Yet, political selection may fail in our...

Though more than 100 countries have adopted gender quotas, the impacts of these reforms on women's political leadership remain largely unknown. We exploit a quasi-experiment - a zipper quota imposed by the Swedish Social Democratic national party on municipal party groups - to examine quotas'...

During the Great Recession mass demonstrations indicated weakened political support in Europe. We show that growing dissatisfaction often reflects poor economic conditions and unemployment is particularly important. Using individual level data for 16 Western European countries for 1976-2010, we...

During the Great Recession mass demonstrations indicated weakened political support in Europe. We show that growing dissatisfaction reflects poor economic conditions; unemployment is particularly important. Using individual level data for 16 Western European countries for 1976-2010, we find that...

This paper studies how society votes on the payroll taxes of a basic income and a social health insurance scheme. Individuals differ along the two most important dimensions when it comes to the design of the two welfare schemes, namely, income and risk. Even though the introduction of a basic...