Why are firms more likely to pay bribes to bureaucrats to bend the rules in developing countries while they instead lobby the government to change the rules in more developed ones? Should we expect an evolution from bribing to lobbying, or can countries get trapped in a bribing equilibrium...

Hausmann, Pritchett, and Rodrik (2005) found that a political regime change increases the probability of an economic growth acceleration. When we tried to replicate their results we discovered that these authors were led astray by a datadescription error in the Polity IV manual. When we correct...

Jakob De Haan, Susanna Lundström, and Jan-Egbert Sturm have written a valuable survey of the literature that uses the Gwartney and Lawson economic freedom (EFW) index. Their discussion of the index’s theoretical underpinnings and methodological ins and outs itself should be useful to scholars...

En este trabajo se estudian los determinantes macroeconómicos de la informalidad laboral en Colombia. Teniendo en cuenta varias definiciones de informalidad, se encuentra que este fenómeno tiene una relación inversa con el nivel de educación de la población ocupada y el grado de desarrollo...

Registering originative business contracts allows entrepreneurs and creditors to choose, and courts to enforce market-friendly “contract” rules that protect innocent third parties when adjudicating disputes on subsequent contracts. This reduces information asymmetry for third parties, which...

Informal payments are a frequently overlooked source of local public finance in developing countries. We use microdata from ten countries to establish stylized facts on the magnitude, form, and distributional implications of this "informal taxation." Informal taxation is widespread, particularly...

This paper documents how the structure of extended family networks in rural Mexico relates to the poverty and inequality of the village of residence. Using the Hispanic naming convention, we construct within-village extended family networks in 504 poor rural villages. Family networks are larger...

This paper examines the dynamics of violence in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict during the Second Intifada. Using data on the daily number of fatalities between September 2000 and January 2005, we estimate reaction functions for both Israelis and Palestinians and find evidence of Granger...