Do institutions constrain presidential power in Africa? Conventional wisdom holds that personalist rule grants African presidents unchecked powers. Consequently, very little research exists on African institutions and their impact on executive authority. In this paper, I use original data on the...

This is a preliminary draft of the sixth of what will be eight chapters in a book titled Politics as a Peculiar Business: Public Choice in a System of Entangled Political Economy. This chapter explains that the generally orderly quality of politically sponsored activities within a society...

When the Arab Uprisings began in 2011, citizens called for dignity, democracy and social justice. Instead of witnessing the birth of more pluralistic societies and stronger governance systems, the past years have brought the Arab region only renewed authoritarianism, conflict, and yet weaker...

States in Africa have registered insignificant prosperity in the post-colonisation era. External and internal factors have been blamed for development path registered by many nations. Among the cited internal factors, little has been said about neopatrimonial regimes dominating Africa. Well, the...

The soccer referee stands in for a judge. Soccer’s Video Assistant Referee (“VAR”) system stands in for algorithms that augment human deciders. Fair play stands in for justice. They are combined and set in a polycentric system of governance, with implications for designing, administering,...

We investigate the complementarity between informal communities and formal government enforcement of norms of reciprocation and exchange. We introduce a model in which people exchange informally within their community as well as externally on a market. We show that informal community and formal...

This paper studies a new mechanism that allows political elites from a non-democratic regime to survive a democratic transition: connections. We document this mechanism in the transition from the Vichy regime to democracy in post-World War II France. The parliamentarians who had supported the...

We investigate the relationship between oil windfalls and income inequality using the subnational data of one of the resource-richest and most unequal countries in the world – Russia. While previous literature has produced contradictory findings due to the use of an aggregate measure of oil...

We find that, in democratic regimes with unlimited reelection, the answer to the question posed above is in the affirmative, contrasting a widely held view. The reason is that resource windfalls increase future graft prospects, motivating opportunistic incumbents to postpone their planned...

Recent studies in psychology and neuroscience find that fictional works exert strong influence on readers and shape their opinions and worldviews. We study the Potterian economy, which we compare to economic models, to assess how Harry Potter books affect economic literacy. We find that some...