Government programs often fail because of poor implementation by local bureaucrats. What explains this chronic weakness of local state capacity? Prominent explanations emphasize rent-seeking by bureaucrats or capture by politicians and special interest groups. This paper documents a different...

By giving political rights to poor voters, do democratic political institutions pose a threat of expropriation to concentrated wealth, much of which is held in the form of financial capital? This paper tests redistributive theories of democratization with a study of the reaction of the market...

Theory and extensive evidence connect poverty and underdevelopment to civil conflict, yet evidence on the impact of development programs on violence is surprisingly mixed. To break this impasse, we exploit a within-country policy experiment to examine the conditions under which anti-poverty...

Why are some communities more successful than others in terms of access to government programs? This paper develops a theory of how the combination of top-down political connections together with bottom-up community civic engagement is required for success in distributive politics. The theory is...