Dal Bó, Foster and Putterman (2010) show experimentally that the effect of a policy may be greater when it is democratically selected than when it is exogenously imposed. In this paper we propose a new and simpler identification strategy to measure this democracy effect. We derive the...

Empirical studies have shown that US politics is heavily tilted in favor of the better off, as political decisions tend to reflect the preferences of the rich while largely ignoring those of the poor and middle classes. These findings have prompted a lively debate about potential mechanisms that...

In zunehmendem Maße wendet sich die Entwicklungsforschung Fragen zu, die den Boden von Beschreibungen sozio-ökonomischer Entwicklungsprozesse anhand quantitativ meßbarer Daten verlassen. Mehr und mehr rücken qualitative Aspekte in den Mittelpunkt des Interesses, wie das Beispiel der...

This book is an attempt of documenting the results from interdisciplinary cooperation within the second intake of IEE's PhD-school from the viewpoint of the PhD-students. Under the above main heading of the school, students of this second cohort were working on the "Micro-Foundation of...

Why do political constituencies delegate decision power to representative assemblies? And how is the size of such assemblies determined? We analyze these questions of constitutional design in a model with voters learning their preferred alternative only after engaging in costly information...

Strengthening elements of direct democracy has become a hotly debated issue especially in purely representative democracies where distrust in political institutions and policymakers has been continually growing in recent years. We develop a compensation model of interest groups seeking a...

Es entspricht einer gängigen Meinung, dass ?die Politik? schlecht funktioniert. Politiker genießen nur eine mäßige Wertschätzung. Die Parteien sind auch für politisch engagierte Bürger als Plattform für eigene Aktivitäten zunehmend unattraktiv geworden und werden eher als notwendiges...

Acemoglu, Johnson, Robinson, and Yared (2008) demonstrate that estimation of the standard adjustment model with country-fixed and time-fixed effects removes the statistical significance of income as a causal factor of democracy. We argue that their empirical approach must produce insignificant...