I analyze subjects' sensitivity to parametric change that does not affect the theoretical prediction. I find that increasing the value of an illegal transaction to a briber and reducing the penalties to both culprits leads to more bribes being paid but does not affect the cooperation of the...

We study the effects of loaded instructions in a bribery experiment. We find a strong gender effect: men and women react differently to real-world framing. The treatment effect becomes significant once we allow for gender specific coefficients. Our paper contributes to the (small) literature on...

I examine the activity of political elites during a period of intensive state-building in pre-imperial China. Using a novel hand-collected dataset on 1,075 political elites, I find that civil unrest was responsible for a majority of the deaths of elites, that there was substitution away from...

Food security is a global concern. Iranian farmers have the obligation to provide food but they don't have the right to food. International restrictions combined with incorrect national schematization put them in a situation that they can't afford to buy their own products just to endure to the...

Hierarchies are pervasive in political settings. From judges to elected politicians, from activists to bureaucrats, political agents compete to be promoted to higher positions. This paper studies political tournaments and their impact on key aspects of political performance: accountability and...

Will blockchain technology revolutionize the economy, or is it mostly hype? Blockchain is a decentralized protocol for creating and running distributed ledgers that makes it possible to track assets, from land to music to intellectual property to tomatoes to bitcoins, cryptographically without a...

The purpose of this study is to assess the nexus between intelligence (or human capital) and statistical capacity in developing countries. The line of inquiry is motivated essentially by: (i) the scarce literature devoted to elucidating poor statistics in developing countries and (ii) an...

This presents a case study of the impact of internal organization on economic regulation. The Office of Plans and Policy at the FCC is used as the subject. The interaction of organization with policy is analyzed and discussed

Governments struggle to allocate funds towards ever-changing priorities, especially when spending increases are limited by austerity. Times of recession might be especially poor moments for reallocations of funds, as budget holders try to protect what they have. This pattern has not been...