Democratic decentralization in the state of West Bengal, of its own, are not producing systems that are more effective or more accountable to local needs and interests. The formal mechanisms matter less than the informal institutions that underpin local political economies. And the understanding...

Using a model of probabilistic voting, we analyse the impact of aid on the political equilibrium in the recipient country or region. We consider two kinds of politicians: the benevolent one is interested in promoting social welfare whereas the other one is clientelistic, his only goal being to...

In this Paper we argue that the political incentives that resource endowments generate are the key to understanding whether or not they are a curse. We show: (1) politicians tend to over-extract natural resources relative to the efficient extraction path because they discount the future too...

Political connections between firms and autocratic regimes are not secret and often even publicly displayed in many developing economies. We argue that tying a firm’s available rent to a regime’s survival acts as a credible commitment forcing entrepreneurs to support the government and to...

In this note we show how a considerably simpler model than the one in our original JDE 2006 paper generates all the same results. We also acknowledge an error in the specification of a utility function in our previous paper.