This paper explores empirically the relation between party's procedures to nominate candidates, such as primaries, and quality of government. Using a panel data of Latin America countries, I find robust evidence that the quality of government is higher during the mandate of primary-nominated...

This paper studies the effect of costly taxation on the fiscal response of local governments to intergovernmental transfers. Using a panel dataset of Peruvian municipalities, I find robust evidence that central government's grants have a greater stimulatory effect in municipalities facing higher...

Collective household models posit that each household member has access to a fraction of the household budget, called a resource share, which defines the shadow budget faced by a household member. Together with the within-household shadow price vector, the shadow budget determines the material...

Most modern mines in the developing world are located in rural areas, where agriculture is the main source of livelihood. This creates the potential of negative spillovers to farmers through competition for key inputs (such as land) and environmental pollution. To explore this issue, we examine...

We propose a generalization of random coefficients models, in which the regression model is an unknown function of a vector of regressors, each of which is multiplied by an unobserved error. We also investigate a more restrictive model which is additive (or additive with interactions) in unknown...

The 13th century witnessed a substantial increase in inequality in the distribution of peasant landholdings relative to the distribution of the late 11th century. Innovations in property rights over land in 12th century England induced peasants to include the trading of small parcels of land as...

This paper describes and implements a simple approach to the most common problem in applied microeconometrics: estimating a linear causal effct when the explanatory variable of interest might be correlated with relevant unobserved variables. The main idea is to place restrictions on the...

The modern Schumpeterian vision in which history matters is of a non-stationary, evolving economy driven by bursts of technological change initiated by agents facing uncertainty and producing long term, path dependent growth and shorter term non-random investment cycles. The New Classical vision...

This paper uses the case of Yanacocha, a large gold mine in Peru, to examine the link between natural resources and local economic development. We find evidence of a positive and sizeable effect of the mine on real income, household consumption and poverty reduction. The effects are driven by...

We summarise salient developments in the interaction of the multilateral trading system and multilateral trading agreements (MTAs) on the one hand and regional trading agreements (RTAs) on the other. We then consider the economic effects of RTAs, comparing customs unions with free trade...