We investigate the links between capital cities, conict, and the quality of governance, starting from the assumption that incumbent elites are constrained by the threat of insurrection, and that this threat is rendered less e_ective by distance from the seat of political power. We develop a...

We provide a first comprehensive account of the dynamics of Eurozone countries from the creation of the Euro to the Great recession. We model each country as an open economy within a monetary union and analyze the dynamics of private leverage, fiscal policy and spreads. Our parsimonious model...

Performance-based financing becomes a common strategy to improve health sector quality. The findings of this paper imply that performance-based financing should take motivational effects and levels of provider capacity into account. Using a field experiment in the Democratic Republic of Congo,...

We show that isolated capital cities are robustly associated with greater levels of corruption across US states, in line with the view that spatial distance between citizens and the seat of political power reduces accountability, and in contrast with the alternative hypothesis that keeping...

If policy-makers care about well-being, they need a recursive model of how adult life satisfaction is predicted by childhood influences, acting both directly and (indirectly) through adult circumstances. We estimate such a model using the British Cohort Study (1970).The most powerful childhood...

This paper explores the impact of input-trade liberalization on imported input and exported product prices. Using Chinese transaction data for 2000-2006, we capture causal effects between exogenous input tarif reductions and within firm changes in HS6 traded product prices. Identifcation is...

This paper shows that goods-market frictions drastically change the dynamics of the labor market, bridging the gap with the data both in terms of persistence and volatility. In a DSGE model with three imperfect markets - goods, labor and credit - we find that credit- and goods-market...

The renewal of interest in macroeconomic theories of search frictions in the goods market requires a deeper understanding of the cyclical properties of the intensive margins in this market. We review the theoretical mechanisms that promote either procyclical or countercyclical movements in time...

Improving service quality via beneficiary participation in managing the service may be unrealistic if a community with low authority must act in opposition to a high authority service provider. We present a framework of how community characteristics change the effectiveness of different types of...

Conflicts are likely less violent if individuals entertain the possibility that the opponent may be right. Why is it so difficult to observe this attitude? In this paper, we consider a game of conflict where two opponents fight in order to impose their preferred policy. Before entering the...