Recent development in international trade theory gives growing emphasis to the quality of the exported products, showing that it affects both the direction of trade and the countries' export performances. However, as quality is unobservable, a measurement problem clearly emerges. In this paper...

We study the causal effect of trade liberalization on child mortality by exploiting 41 policy reform experiments in the 1960-2010 period. The Synthetic Control Method for comparative case studies allows to compare at the country level the trajectory of post-reform health outcomes of treated...

We study the political economy of instrument choice in agricultural and food policies. After a review of the historical evolution of European agricultural price and trade policy instruments since 1880, we develop a political economy model of instrument choice. The key predictions of the model...

This paper studies the effect of political regime transitions on public policy using a dataset on global agricultural distortions over 50 years (including data from 74 developing and developed countries over the period 1955-2005). We employ both difference-in-differences regressions and...

Mass media plays a crucial role in infirmation distribution and thus in the political market and public policy making. Theory predicts that infirmation provided by mass media reflects the media's incentives to provide news to different types of groups in society, and affects these...

Mass media play a crucial role in information distribution and in the political market and public policy making. Theory predicts that information provided by the mass media reflects the media's incentives to provide news to different groups in society and affects these groups' influence in...

This paper studies the effect of political regime transitions on public policy using a new data set on global agricultural and food policies over a 50-year period (including data from 74 developing and developed countries over the 1955?2005 period). The authors find evidence that democratization...

This paper studies the effect of political regime transitions on public policy using a new data set on global agricultural and food policies over a 50-year period (including data from 74 developing and developed countries over the 1955-2005 period). We find evidence that democratization leads to...