Who becomes a top politician in China? We focus on provincial leaders - a pool of candidates for top political office - and examine how their chances of promotion depend on their performance in office and connections with top politicians. Our empirical analysis, based on the curriculum vitae of...

Who becomes a top politician in China? We focus on provincial leaders - a pool of candidates for top political office - and examine how their chances of promotion depend on their performance in office and connections with top politicians. Our empirical analysis, based on the curriculum vitae of...

In the book, some 25 authors report on the implementation of the ECHR in their respective countries, including questions of ratification and implementation in law, awareness by legal professionals, inclusion in the curricula of law schools, practice of the courts, cases brought to Strasbourg,...

We argue that inter-jurisdictional competition in a regionally decentralized authoritarian regime distorts local politicians' incentives in resource allocation among firms from their own city and a competing city. We develop a tournament model of project selection that captures the driving...

We analyze a dataset constructed on the political turnovers of 3,623 county leaders in China during 1999-2008, and find that their career incentives — the institutional foundations of China's three decades of sustained economic growth — remain powerful. This is in spite of a policy shock...

The paper demonstrates why the transition process is taking more time than predicted and why many countries are still far away from the projected goal: a developed market economy. Analysing the causes and re-examining the endogenous character of the transition progress, the authors conclude that...

Questions of domination and power, legitimacy and legitimation have driven 20th century research on dictatorship and democracy, on totalitarian and authoritarian regimes, on fascism and communism and even on capitalism versus socialism. Reference to Max Weber's ideal-types of legitimate...

This Paper surveys the theoretical literature on the effect of soft budget constraints (SBC) on economies in transition from centralization to capitalism; it also reviews our understanding of SBC in general. It focuses on the conception of the SBC syndrome as a commitment problem. We show that...

It has been increasingly recognized that the Chinese goverm-nent's newly acquired enthusiasm for economic development is a major factor explaining the relative success of China's transition from socialism. This paper argues that the changed behavior of the Chinese government is an outcome of a...