There has been much debate over the past several years about the financial burden of attending college. At the same time, the growth of for-profit institutions has led some to call for more stringent regulation of access to federal financial aid. In this paper, we first review general concerns...

Efforts to explain corruption have increased dramatically in recent years. The interest stems from the increasing weight economists assign to corruption when explaining economic growth. A great deal of the research focuses on how political institutions influence perceptions of corruption. We...

National statistical systems are the enterprises tasked with collecting, validating and reporting societal attributes. These data serve many purposes – they allow governments to improve services, economic actors to traverse markets, and academics to assess social theories. National statistical...

It is a widespread conventional wisdom that presidential pardons - the only way for offenders to remove or eliminate all disabilities that arise from a federal or military offense - are political. We move beyond this belief and assess five broad ways that federal pardons may be systematically...

This essay quantitatively investigates several possible foundations for environmental sustainability, as measured across countries with varying geography, development patterns, social customs, and political arrangements. We first test two central hypotheses about the roles of democratization and...

This manuscript examines the relationship between political veto points, credible commitments and regulatory compliance costs. We extend the work on credible commitments in comparative political economy and apply this framework to environmental compliance costs in the American states. Our...

Numerous recent studies have addressed how the investment choices of firms depend on elite perceptions of the quality of national regulatory regimes. Likewise, other studies show that government structures can help to support credible commitments that protect market mechanisms. We provide the...

Efforts to explain corruption have increased dramatically over the last few years. The interest stems from the increasing weight economists assign to corruption when explaining economic growth and from the availability of data that measure it. Much of the effort centers on how political...

This study addresses institutional representation in legislative delegations through the decomposition of the southern U.S. House delegation over time. Linear first-order difference equations are calculated to show the shift from the Solid South and the disintegration of Democratic dominance....

One consequence of the president's use of rhetoric to shape the public agenda, the media, and congressional attention is less recognized: presidential rhetoric shapes the priorities of the administrative agents over whom he seeks managerial control. We present statistical tests of the managerial...