This study investigates the extent to which Mexican workers’ remittances are affected from the recent housing market decline in the United States. Results from a multivariate model reveal that an increase in the national U.S. foreclosure rate has a negative and statistically significant impact...

This paper uses variations in international commodity prices and rainfall to construct instrumental variables estimates of the within-country effect that changes in the size of the agricultural sector and GDP per capita growth have on the urbanization rate. For a panel of 41 African countries...

This paper presents a few stylized facts on the patterns of China's industrialization by computing a set of multi-dimensional measures on industrial concentration, regional specialization, and clustering based on census data at the firm level in 1995 and 2004. Our results show that China's rapid...

We examine spatial spillovers in institutional development. Dependent variables are institutional measures reflecting politics, law, and governmental administration. The explanatory variable of interest is the level of institutions in bordering countries—a spatial lag of the dependent...

The impact of competition on school performance is likely to depend on whether parents are informed about schools' effectiveness or value added (which may or may not be correlated with absolute measures of their quality), and on whether this information influences their school choices, thereby...

This paper presents instrumental variables estimates of the effects of GDP per capita volatility on the size of government. We show that for a panel of 157 countries spanning more than half a century, rainfall volatility has a significant positive effect on GDP per capita volatility in countries...

In many developing countries, public resource allocation is often biased against the rural population. Since a vast majority of the poor live in rural areas, the bias is highlighted as one of the most important institutional factors contributing to poverty. This paper develops a political...

This paper explains in simple English some of the main ideas about autocracy first developed elsewhere (e.g., in my book, The Political Economy of Dictatorship (Cambridge University Press, 1998). I use rational choice theory to explain the behavior of dictatorships and develop policy toward...