This paper argues that corruption patterns are endogenous to political structures. Thus, corruption can be systemic and planned rather than decentralized and coincidental. In an economic system without law or property rights, a kleptocratic state may arise as a predatory hierarchy from a state...

Donors in development cooperation increasingly emphasize the importance of public accountability in developing countries for the good functioning of democratic institutions, governance and the effectiveness of their aid. Political parties are prime actors in a democratic society that have...

Can process conditionality really enhance poverty reduction in developing countries? This question is addressed in the framework of a politico-economic model considering political distortions both on the recipient and on the donor side. It turns out that process conditionality is a very useful...

Bribery is sometimes justified on the theory that it is a victimless crime, that everybody does it and no body gets hurt. This article examines the assumptions underlying those justifications. First, the article reviews recent macro-economic scholarship refuting the older thesis that bribery...

World governance today is characterized by international organizations lacking democratic legitimacy and control by the citizens they claim to represent. They are also criticized for being inefficient. This leads to violent protests and to NGOs having great influence. To address these problems,...

We analyze the influence of IMF and World Bank programs on political regime transitions. We develop an extended version of Acemoglu and Robinson's (American Economic Review 91, 2001) model of political transitions to show how the anticipation of new loans from international financial...

This study explores the influence of trade policy uncertainty on medical innovation investment in developing nations from 1980 to 2020, with a focus on the period of COVID-19. We used exogenous and heterogeneous exposure to trade-policy-uncertainty resolutions from developing countries' trade...

Why do rebels vary their tactics? Some insurgents employ terrorism and hit-and run attacks; others wage conventional wars against state rivals. Although recent scholarship studies how the technologies of rebellion differ across insurgencies, we have few explanations for why rebel tactics vary...

We present the optimal contract for financing a project that has N stages to be completed sequentially when the principal can not commit to abandone the project before it is completed and the project to be completed is valued by the agent. In a dynamic moral hazard setting, we find that the...

Long-term relationships are generally believed to incentivize investments better than short-term relationships. We show that while this is true for quality investments, it is not always true for responsibility investments. In particular, when a reliable and an unreliable supplier compete for the...