Patronage--the discretionary allocation of public sector jobs--continues to be a dominant way government is staffed in most Latin American countries and it is proving resistant to the imprecations of public sector reformers. Despite the ubiquity of patronage systems, however, all major countries...

Firms in Africa report "regulatory and economic policy uncertainty" as a top constraint to their growth. We argue that often firms in Africa do not cope with policy rules, rather they face deals; firm-specific policy actions that can be influenced by firm actions (e.g. bribes) and...

Ideas about social policy and its role in development have shifted over time, signaling the difficulty of finding clarity in approaches to social investment, poverty alleviation, and equity. In consequence, research and practice related to social policy and poverty alleviation have left a legacy...

A number of development assistance programs promote community interaction as a means of building social capital. Yet, despite strong theoretical underpinnings, the role of repeat interactions in sustaining cooperation has proven difficult to identify empirically. We provide the first...

Good governance has grown rapidly to become a major ingredient in analyses of what's missing in countries struggling for economic and political development. Intuitively and in research, good governance is a seductive idea--who, after all, can reasonably defend bad governance? Nevertheless, the...

Humans naturally dispose of objects that disgust them. Is this phenomenon so deeply embedded that even incidental disgust--i.e., where the source of disgust is unrelated to a possessed object--triggers disposal? Two experiments were designed to answer this question. Two film clips served as...

The standard explanation of electoral reform is offered by rational choice accounts. These regard the choice of rules as an elite?level issue, dominated by partisan interests bargaining within the legislature, where citizens are usually marginalized and powerless. Such accounts may help to...

We use a rich dataset of weekly cigarette sales to examine how consumers adapt their behavior before and after excise tax increases--whether by reducing demand, stockpiling, traveling to low-tax jurisdictions, or substituting towards lower-cost brands. Consumer response varies substantially for...

As countries throughout the world democratize and decentralize, citizen participation in public life should increase. In this paper, I suggest that democratic participation in local government is enhanced when citizens can reply affirmatively to at least three questions about their ability to...