This study attempts a first causal examination of the role of state capacity in China's economic performance. Effective state capacity connotes not just ability to extract tax from citizens but also the ability to convert taxes into public investment. Equally importantly, these capacities must...

Policy making power enables governments to redistribute income to powerful interests in society. However, some governments exhibit greater concern for aggregate welfare than others. This government behavior may itself be endogenously determined by a number of economic, political and...

Is there a causal relationship between shocks to renewable natural resources, such as agricultural and forest lands, and the intensity of conflict? In this paper, we conduct a rigorous econometric analysis of a civil conflict that the Indian Prime Minister has called the single biggest internal...

Theory and extensive evidence connect poverty and underdevelopment to civil conflict, yet evidence on the impact of development programs on violence is surprisingly mixed. To break this impasse, we exploit a within-country policy experiment to examine the conditions under which anti-poverty...

The authors study whether political campaign contributions influence agricultural protection in the United States in the manner suggested by the political economy model of Grossman and Helpman (1994). This is the first attempt to test this model using agricultural data. The authors test the...

This paper surveys the empirical literature on the political economy of agricultural protection. A detailed data set of agricultural PAC (Political Action Committee) contributions over five U.S. congressional election cycles over the 1991-2000 period is used to investigate the relationship...

China's 2007 Property Law provides a rare large scale quasi experiment to examine the impact of restoring property rights protections to private ownership of assets. The paper presents evidence of the Law's impact on the universe of Chinese firms over 1998-2013 utilizing novel administrative...

This paper highlights strategic patenting as an underexplored form of rent-seeking behaviors by large firms to gain political benefits. We argue that firms, especially large ones, can strategically time their innovation efforts to create false signals to pursue subsidies; they can achieve this...