We identify a new explanation for political budget cycles (PBCs): politicians have stronger incentives to increase spending around elections in the presence of younger political parties. Previous research suggests that PBCs should be larger when voters are uninformed about politician...

Prior research on mass media and government accountability has not examined the effects of citizen media access on broad public services, such as education. At the same time, research has abstracted from the potentially influential role of mass media on parental investments in children's...

This outstanding book presents new original contributions from some of the world's leading economists including Ronald Coase, Douglass C. North, Masahiko Aoki, Oliver E. Williamson and Harold Demsetz. It demonstrates the extent and depth of the New Institutional Economics research programme...

This paper advances research on inequality with unique, new data on income distribution in 61 countries, including 20 Latin American countries, to explore the effects of political parties on redistribution. First, consistent with a central -- but still contested -- assumption of the political...

Delegation and policy rules are frequently suggested strategies for governments to establish credible commitments. Existing literature on rules and delegation in macroeconomic policy has generally avoided the question of why governments that delegate or establish rules do not subsequently...

Broad consensus exists that the ability of political actors to make credible commitments is key to development. An important and little-explored determinant of the credibility of political commitments is the existence of organizations that facilitate citizen collective action to sanction...

Ha-Joon Chang, in his article ‘Institutions and Economic Development: Theory, Policy and History’, argues that the institutions and development literature is theoretically and empirically flawed, trapped by a failure to account for the contextual factors that influence the institutions that...