Since the "third wave" of democratization began in 1974, nearly 100 states have adopted democratic forms of government, including, of course, most of the former Soviet bloc nations. Policy-makers in the west have expressed the hope that this democratic wave will extend even further, to the...

Credit rating agencies collapse high-dimensional borrower characteristics into summaries of creditworthiness, facilitating capital flows. But biases embedded in rating algorithms may lead to misallocation. We test for bias in sovereign credit ratings across a wide array of borrower-country...