Politicians can use the public sector to give jobs to cronies, at the expense of the efficiency of those organisations and general welfare. Motivated by a simple model of cronyism that predicts spikes in appointments to state-owned firms near elections, we regress 1980-2008 monthly hirings...

Politicians can use the public sector to give jobs to cronies, at the expense of the efficiency of those organisations and general welfare. In this paper, we regress monthly hires across all firms in Portugal with some degree of public ownership on the country's 1980-2018 political cycle. We...

Politicians can use the public sector to give jobs to cronies, at the expense of the efficiency of those organisations and general welfare. Motivated by a simple model of cronyism that predicts spikes in appointments to state-owned firms near elections, we regress 1980-2008 monthly hirings...

Politicians can use the public sector to give jobs to cronies, at the expense of the efficiency of those organisations and general welfare. In this paper, we regress monthly hires across all firms in Portugal with some degree of public ownership on the country's 1980-2018 political cycle. We...

While recent changes to Fairtrade's governance structures aim to facilitate 'stronger voices' for producers (Fairtrade International 2011b), relatively little is known about the impact of these new structures on individuals. Utilizing Fung and Wright's (2003) framework of Empowered Participatory...

France currently needs deep structural reforms to boost competitiveness; but such reforms seem impossible while France remains in the straitjacket of the rules-bound transfer union that is the current Eurozone. High outstanding sovereign debt coupled with almost zero economic growth pose a real...

The importance of pre-colonial history on contemporary African development has become an important field of study within development economics in recent years. In particular (Gennaioli & Rainer, 2007) suggest that pre-colonial political centralization has had an impact on contemporary levels of...

Evidence on the pre-modern relationship between wealth and fertility has so far almost entirely relied upon data from Europe. We use British colonial records from early 19th-century India on widow suicides (satis) to show that there is a robust positive relationship between income and fertility.

In this paper I examine the concept of "vulnerability" within the context of income mobility of the poor. While the concept of poverty is well developed, the concept of vulnerability is less established in the economic literature. I test for the dynamics of vulnerable households in the UK using...

Politicians can use the public sector to give jobs to cronies, at the expense of the efficiency of those organisations and general welfare. Motivated by a simple model of cronyism that predicts spikes in appointments to state-owned firms near elections, we regress 1980-2008 monthly hirings...