Informal land tenure continues to be the norm in developing countries despite billions spent on land administration and reform programs in the last 20 years. The problem goes deeper than insufficient funding or poorly executed projects. By strengthening public land registry institutions that...

We argue that several easily identifiable structural features constitute the key ingredients of effective state bureaucracies and should help to predict ratings of bureaucratic performance: competitive salaries, internal promotion and career stability, and meritocratic recruitment. We collect a...

With a change in neo-liberalists’ priorities in the global south, a shift from input-output democracy and a fuzzy relationship between democratisation and quality-of-government, has anti-corruption policy movement sizzled-out, especially, considering the popularity of Chinese Aid and the fact...

Governments in developing countries have low fiscal capacity yet face pressures to provide public goods and services, leading them to rely on various unusual fiscal arrangements. We document one such - hitherto unexplored - arrangement: informal fiscal systems that rely on local bureaucrats to...