This paper presents evidence on the consequences of the 1912 introduction of "quasiuniversal" male suffrage in Italy. The reform increased the electorate from slightly less than three million to 8,650,000 and left the electoral rules and the district boundaries unchanged. This allows us to...

We study how inefficiencies of market failure may be further amplified by political choices made by interest groups created in the inefficient market. We take an occupational choice framework, where agents are endowed heterogeneously with wealth and talent. In our model, market failure due to...

Organizations often use awards to incentivize performance. We design a field experiment to unbundle the mechanisms through which awards may affect behavior: by facilitating social comparison and by conferring recognition and visibility. In a nationwide health worker training program in Zambia,...

Is there a trade-off between people's preference for income equality and income mobility? Testing for the existence of such a trade-off is difficult because mobility is a multifaceted concept. We analyse results from a questionnaire experiment based on simple precise concepts of income...

This paper presents a simple model of strategic network formation with local complementarities in effort levels and positive local externalities for a general class of payoff functions. Results are obtained for one-sided and two-sided link creation. In both cases (pairwise) Nash equilibrium...

For testing lack of correlation against spatial autoregressive alternatives, Lagrange multiplier tests enjoy their usual computational advantages, but the (x squared) first-order asymptotic approximation to critical values can be poor in small samples. We develop refined tests for lack of...

Institutions can limit governments' policy options. Such restrictions are usually commended as solutions to time inconsistency problems or coordination failures. However, policy constraints can have important drawbacks and these disadvantages have generally been overlooked to date. When...

This paper studies robustness of bootstrap inference methods for instrumental variable (IV)regression models. We consider test statistics for parameter hypotheses based on the IV estimatorand generalized method of trimmed moments (GMTM) estimator introduced by Cížek (2008, 2009),and compare...

We examine the evidence on rank and income mobility in China during the decades immediately preceding and immediately following the millennium using panel data from the China Health and Nutrition Survey. We show that rank mobility changed markedly over the period: in this respect China is...