This study explores the manner in which the availability of natural resources wealth, foreign aid or corruption potential constrains institutional improvements. By providing a framework, where rulers, bureaucracy and the citizens act endogenously, we show that the rents from these resources can...

This paper relates unique data on criminal records of local politicians in India to corruption, crime and poverty. Using a regression discontinuity design, whereby individuals living in districts where a criminal politician barely won are compared to individuals living in districts where a...

High-quality data on state-level inequality and incomes, panel data on corruption convictions, and careful attention to the consequences of including or excluding fixed effects in the panel specification allow us to estimate the impact of income considerations on the decision to undertake...

The paper investigates the effects of checks and balances on corruption. Within a presidential system, effective separation of powers is achieved under divided government, with the executive and legislative branches being controlled by different political parties. When government is unified, no...

We present a simple model, illustrating how democracy may improve the quality of the economic institutions. The model further suggests that institutional quality varies more across autocracies than across democracy and that the positive effect of democracies on economic institutional quality...

Recent studies in psychology and neuroscience offer systematic evidence that fictional works exert a surprisingly strong influence on readers and have the power to shape their opinions and worldviews. Building on these findings, we study ‘Potterian economics’, the economic ideas, insights,...

What do we know about the politics of corporate governance in emerging markets? While the state-level institutions have been amply explored, firm-level dynamics remain under-theorized. Complementing the orthodox emphasis on external finance as causal force behind the adoption of “minority...

Are federal prosecutors influenced by partisan political concerns? We examine this question by analyzing forty years of federal corruption convictions at the state and federal district levels. Our key finding is that state-level corruption convictions fall by 8% in years when a state’s...

This paper examines how party dominance affects elected politicians’ quality, measured by their career path. Politicians’ career is divided between political and technical or administrative posts. To examine the relationship between party dominance and career path, I use data from the...

Economic organization of the imaginary worlds depicted in popular literary works may be viewed as a mirror to public opinion on the economic organization of life. If a book becomes a best-seller, it is because the book conveys messages, feelings, and events the readers can relate to. In other...