Who becomes a top politician in China? We focus on provincial leaders a pool of candidates for top political office and examine how their chances of promotion depend on their performance in office and connections with top politicians. Our empirical analysis, based on the curriculum vitae of...

Do citizens have a role in constraining the policies of autocratic governments? Usually political and economic literature models autocracy as if citizens have no role in constraining a leader's behavior, when in fact autocratic governments are afraid of potential citizen revolts. In this paper...

This paper develops a new argument for the Chinese Communist Party´s success in implementing the post-Mao economic reform. We build a three-player political agency model, showing that the credibility of the threats of deposition by the selectorate and of revolts by citizens are both crucial...

This paper considers the effects of sequencing and reform speed on output performance in transition countries. These largely unsettled issues are addressed using principal component techniques to construct reform clusters and by explicit tests of speed effects. The results indicate that...

Growth regressions have provided important insights into the impact of economic reforms on growth in transition economies. Using principal components to decompose reform variables and construct reform clusters, we address unsettled issues such as the importance of sequencing and reform speed....

Who becomes a top politician in China? We focus on provincial leaders - a pool of candidates for top political office - and examine how their chances of promotion depend on their performance in office and connections with top politicians. Our empirical analysis, based on the curriculum vitae of...

We study Pareto improvements whose implementation requires knowledge of only market prices and traded quantities, not utility and demand functions. Quantity stabilization gives agents the right to repeat the net trades they previously conducted, but requires policymakers to have records of those...

Growth regressions have provided important insights into the impact of economic reforms on growth in transition economies.Using principal components to decompose reform variables and construct reform clusters, we address unsettled issues such as the importance of sequencing and reform speed.The...

Growth regressions have provided important insights into the impact of economic reforms on growth in transition economies. Using principal components to decompose reform variables and construct reform clusters, we address unsettled issues such as the importance of sequencing and reform speed....