We analyze the countervailing incentives that mid-level appellate judges face when deciding whether to remand a case back to the lower court. Although appellate courts' ability to remand cases can mitigate moral hazard problems, by restraining trial court judges, it may sometimes instead...

This paper aims at contributing to a better understanding of the conditions of self-enforcing democracy by analyzing the recent wave of autocratic transitions. Based on a game-theoretic framework, we work out the conditions under which governments may induce the diverse public authorities to...

We study a randomized Community Driven Reconstruction (CDR) intervention that provided two years of exposure to democratic practices in 1250 villages in eastern Congo. To assess its impact, we examine behavior in a village-level unconditional cash transfer project that distributed $1000 to 457...

A growing number of economic geography scholars have discussed the spatial dimensions of sustainability innovation in socio-technical systems to overcome societal, economic, and ecological problems. This research usually focuses on businesses in the knowledge economy and success factors....

Constitutional loyalty, the importance ascribed to complying with constitutional rules, is difficult to measure across countries due to differences in context, history, and culture. We overcome this challenge by exploiting the COVID-19 pandemic as an ideal setting in which societies around the...

This paper re-examines the contribution of five major corruption determinants emphasized by the literature, through an empirical analysis based on a hierarchical modelling of firm-level corruption data. Exploiting a baseline sample of 34,358 bribe reports of firms from 71 developing and...

We examine whether frontier rule, which disallows frontier residents from recourse to formal institutions of conflict management and disproportionately empowers tribal elites, provides a more fragile basis for maintaining social order in the face of shocks. Combining a historical border that...

We examine whether frontier rule, which disallows frontier residents from a recourse to formal institutions of conflict management and disproportionately empowers tribal elites, provides a more fragile basis for maintaining social order in the face of shocks. Combining a historical border...

This paper aims at contributing to a better understanding of the conditions of self-enforcing democracy by analyzing the recent wave of autocratic transitions. Based on a game-theoretic framework, we work out the conditions under which governments may induce the diverse public authorities to...

We examine whether gender quotas introduced by development agencies empower women. As part of a development program, an international organization created community management committees in 661 villages to oversee village level program expenditures. In a randomly selected half of these villages...