Countries with oil, mineral or other natural resource wealth, on average, have failed to show better economic performance than those without, often because of undesirable side effects. This is the phenomenon known as the Natural Resource Curse. This paper reviews the literature, classified...

This paper asks how strong African Public Financial Management (PFM) has become, after a decade and more of reform. How well do African PFM systems in place now facilitate effective public financial management? Where are the next challenges and how can they be met? It analyzes recent PFM...

Although the positive association between religiosity and life satisfaction is well documented, much theoretical and empirical controversy surrounds the question of how religion actually shapes life satisfaction. Using a new panel dataset, this study offers strong evidence for social and...

Based on literature and expert interviews, we developed the Crisis Leader Efficacy in Assessing and Deciding scale (C-LEAD) to capture the efficacy of leaders to assess information and make decisions in a public health and safety crisis. In Studies 1 and 2, we find that C-LEAD predicts...

Good governance has grown rapidly to become a major ingredient in analyses of what’s missing in countries struggling for economic and political development. Intuitively and in research, good governance is a seductive idea—who, after all, can reasonably defend bad governance?...

The information structure of the climate change policy collaboration problem necessitates the design of institutions to enhance public knowledge about nations’ commitments, policies, and outcomes. The international community has addressed this kind of problem in a wide array of other...

We study whether prompts to form and recall a plan can increase individuals’ responsiveness to reminders to make and attend beneficial appointments. At four companies, all employees due for a colonoscopy were randomly assigned to receive either a control mailing or a treatment mailing....

Twenty years ago Russia and fourteen other newly-independent states emerged from the ruins of the Soviet empire, many as nations for the first time in history. As is typical in the aftermath of the collapse of an empire, this was followed by a period of chaos, confusion, and corruption. As the...

This autobiographical essay reflects on my sociological career, highlighting the integration of sociology with social policy. I discuss the personal, social, and intellectual experiences, ranging from childhood to adult life, that influenced my pursuit of studies in race and ethnic relations and...

In this paper, we provide new evidence regarding the pass-through of diesel and gasoline taxes to prices, and how the estimated pass-through depends on a variety of supply conditions including a measure of state residual supply elasticity, and refinery and inventory constraints. In addition, we...