This paper uses household panel data from rural Vietnam to explore the effects of having a relative in a position of political or bureaucratic power on farmers' agricultural investment decisions. Our main result is that households significantly increase their investment in land improvement as a...

Studies of land property rights usually focus on tenure security and transfer rights. Rights to determine how to use the land are regularly ignored. However, user rights are often limited. Relying on a unique Vietnamese panel data set at both household and plot levels, we show that crop choice...

This paper uses household panel data from rural Vietnam to explore the effects of having a relative in a position of political or bureaucratic power. Our results suggest that households increase their investment in land improvements due to such ties. Likely explanations are that connections to...

Cooperation can be induced by an authority with the power to mete out sanctions for free riders, but law enforcement is prone to error. This paper experimentally analyzes preferences for and consequences of errors in formal sanctions against free riders in a public goods game. With type I...

We examine the effects of randomly introduced economic inequality on voluntary cooperation and whether this relationship is influenced by the quality of local institutions, as proxied by corruption. We use representative data from a large-scale lab-in-the-field public goods experiment with over...

The paper studies in a simple, Downsian model of political competition how the private provision of public goods is affected when it is embedded in a system of democracy and redistributive taxation. Results show that the positive effect of inequality on public goods production, which Olson...