The recent global financial crisis placed new economic and fiscal pressures on donor countries that may have long-term effects on their ability and willingness to provide aid. Not only did donor-country incomes fall, but the cause of the drop — the banking and financial-sector crisis — may...

Market-oriented economic policies-reflected in limited economic activity by government, protection of private property rights, sound monetary policy, outward orientation regarding trade and efficient tax and regulatory policy-have been strongly linked to faster rates of economic growth. Foreign...

The number of states with election-day registration (EDR) of voters doubled in the early 1990s, providing a new opportunity to estimate the turnout impact of EDR. Because of some important and neglected features of the "first wave" of EDR states, adopting EDR in the early 1970s, there is good...

Zak & Knack (2001) demonstrate that interpersonal trust substantially impacts economic growth, and that sufficient interpersonal trust is necessary for economic development. To investigate the ability of policy-makers to affect trust levels, this paper builds a formal model characterizing public...

This paper summarizes progress made in a DfID-funded World Bank initiative to test and develop policy-relevant, politically acceptable, quantitative indicators of governance. There are two major components involved in the process of generating indicators that are practical means of reform....

Douglass North (1990) describes institutions as the rules of the game that set limits on human behavior, now a universally-accepted definition. North and others especially underline the crucial role of informal social norms. They predict that, like all rules of the game, social norms should...

The first presidential election following implementation of the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 was also the first in the lifetimes of most Americans in which a minority of the voting-age population bothered to vote. While that outcome must be a source of embarrassment to many reform...

We reconstruct a dataset used by Persson and Tabellini (AER, 1994) to test the robustness of their finding that inequality reduces income growth, but only in democracies. We find that their result is highly sensitive to the use of data sources on both democracy and inequality. When we substitute...