Corporate governance in the private sector and corruption are important for economic development and private sector development. This paper investigates how corporate governance in private-sector media companies can affect public corruption. The analytical framework, based on models of corporate...

Households in rural Colombia are confronted with a variety of violent threats: attacks and displacement threats by guerrillas and paramilitaries, gang violence among drug traffickers, and high common delinquency. In this context, households have to adjust their day-to-day decisions, including...

This paper presents a three-sector static model to explore the rationale for a series of institutional distortions in developing countries. The authors argue that, after World War II, motivated by a belief in the development of state-of-the-art industries as a means for nation building, the...

Since its birth in 1944, the World Bank has had a strong focus on development projects. Yet, it did not have a project evaluation unit until the early 1970s. An early attempt to conceptualize project appraisal had been made in the 1960s by Albert Hirschman, whose undertaking raised high...

The Millennium Development Goals, which expire in 2015, were a global agreement to promote human development and reduce poverty. But they did not create a legalized institutional regime, in which precise obligations would be delegated to specific actors, nor were they, in many respects,...

Why is there significant variation in rent extraction among high-income democracies? A large number of political economy investigations into this research question have found that a long period of democratic rule and high per capita income are associated with less rent extraction among public...

Mass media play a crucial role in information distribution and in the political market and public policy making. Theory predicts that information provided by the mass media reflects the media's incentives to provide news to different groups in society and affects these groups'influence in policy...

This paper takes advantage of unique intra-country variation in the Philippines power sector to examine under what conditions politicians have an incentive to"capture"an electric utility and use it for the purposes of rent-seeking. The authors hypothesize that the level of capture is determined...

Trade and investment in services are inhibited by a range of policy restrictions, but the best offers so far in the Doha negotiations are on average twice as restrictive as actual policy. They will generate no additional market opening. Regulatory concerns help explain the limited progress. This...

Can increasing sophistication in service exports lead to economic growth? Although services were historically produced primarily for domestic consumption, they are gradually becoming more productive, tradable and unbundled. The authors construct an index of"service exports sophistication"to...