In "Evaluating Recipes for Development Success" Avinash Dixit criticizes recent efforts to identify the "fundamental" causes of development and to distill policy recommendations from these efforts. This comment focuses on the strand of that literature related to institutions and development. Two...

Voting is a common feature of most firms. Unrestricted voting, however, can lead to unstable decision-making. The authors find that firms make trade-offs among collective decision-making, production scale, firm structure, and voter characteristics that are consistent with efforts to economize on...

Early neoclassical analyses predicted that poor countries would grow faster than wealthy countries because of technological advances and diminishing returns to capital in the latter. The reverse has occurred: poor countries are falling back rather than catching up. The authors suggest here that...

Most efforts to trace the effects of income inequality on growth have focused on redistribution. However, empirical investigation has not substantiated either the positive association of income inequality with redistribution or the negative association of redistribution with economic growth. The...

The authors examine a unique public spending program that is proliferating across developing countries, the constituency development fund, to investigate when legislators exert more effort on behalf of their constituents. Using data from India, they find that legislator effort is significantly...

The literature argues that the presence of multiple veto players (government decisionmakers) with polarized interests increases the credibility of sovereign commitments, but reduces the ability of governments to adjust policies in the event of exogenous shocks that jeopardize their ability to...

This paper introduces a large new cross-country database on political institutions: the Database on Political Institutions (DPI). The authors summarize key variables (many of them new), compare this data set with others, and explore the range of issues for which the data should prove invaluable....

Countries vary systematically with respect to the incentives of politicians to provide broad public goods, and to reduce poverty. Even in developing countries that are democracies, politicians often have incentives to divert resources to political rents, and to private transfers that benefit a...

Keefer reviews progress made in understanding the effects of different dimensions of governance on economic development, and the sources of good governance. The term governance has been used to embrace concepts that are heterogeneous both with respect to their effects on economic development and...