Recent years have seen a significant focus in the literature on growth and development on the idea that legal and political institutions are the key determinant of economic development. The main finding of this paper is that the focus on the primacy of legal and political institutions may be...

This paper contributes to the aid effectiveness debate by applying a vector autoregression model to a panel of Sub-Saharan African countries. This method avoids the need for instrumental variables and allows one to analyse the impact of foreign aid on human development and on economic...

We analyze the effects of corruption and institutional quality on the quality of business regulation. Our key findings indicate that corruption negatively affects the quality of regulation and that general institutional quality is insignificant once corruption is controlled for. These findings...

This paper examines the effect that a country's business regulatory environment has on the amount of foreign direct investment it attracts. We use the World Bank's Ease of Doing Business ranking to capture the costs that firms face when operating in a country. Several interesting results emerge....

This paper examines the effect that experiencing corruption has on an individual's mental health using microeconomic data from the Afrobarometer surveys. The results show a statistically significant and economically meaningful effect in both binary and ordered probit models using both an...

We find that new states are perceived to be more corrupt even though businesses do not report more bribery in newer states. This is suggestive of an unearned, and likely high, reputational cost to being a new state. These findings hold over a number of specifications that include additional...

We analyse policy makers' incentives to fight corruption under different institutional qualities. We find that 'public officials', even when non-corrupt, significantly distort anti-corruption institutions by choosing a lower detection probability when this probability applies to their own...

Are women less corrupt in business? We revisit this question using firm-level data from the World Bank’s Enterprise Surveys, which measure firms’ experience of corruption and the gender of their owners and top managers. We find that women in positions of influence are associated with less...