This paper estimates the effect of enrollment in a large scale anti-poverty program in Colombia, Familias en Acción (FA), on intent to vote, turnout and electoral choice. For identification we use discontinuities in program eligibility and variation in program enrollment across voting booths....

To predict economic success and failure, academics and policymakers alike are interested in the differences in institutional structures across natural resource-based economies. This paper uses a political economy framework to examine the effect of institutional variables on per capita...

In this review we synthetize the existing contributions that use econometric approaches to examine the influence of institutions and governance on environmental policy, environmental outcomes, and investments. The paper describes how the relationship between institutions and various response...

Acemoglu, Johnson, Robinson, and Yared (2008) document that the cross-country correlation between income per capita and democracy disappears once including country fixed effects. This paper tests the hypothesis that the effect of income on democracy might differ systematically across countries....

Data on the growth performances of countries with similar comparative (dis)advantage and political institutions reveal a striking variation across world regions. While some former autocracies such as the East Asian growth miracles have done remarkably well, others such as the Latin American...

Vote-buying is widely used by parties in developing countries to influence the outcome of elections. We examine the impact of vote-buying on growth. We consider a model with a poverty trap where redistribution can promote growth. We show that vote-buying contributes to the persistence of poverty...

This paper examines interconnections between law, politics and the quality of government in Africa. We investigate whether African democracies enjoy relatively better government quality compared to their counterparts with more autocratic inclinations. The empirical evidence is based on...

In many situations the individuals who can generate some output must enter a contest for appropriating this output. This paper analyses the investment incentives of such agents and the role of incumbency advantages in the contest. Depending on the advantages, an increase in the productivity of...

This paper focuses on how political regimes affect financial development in Africa, contingent on religious-domination, income-levels and colonial-legacies. The main findings are summarized as follows. Authoritarian regimes have a higher propensity to effect policies that favour the development...

This paper examines the big questions of African comparative politics. It assesses the interaction of three crucial components in the development of the continent: law, democracy and quality of government. Political regimes of democracy, polity and autocracy are instrumented with income-levels,...