We analyze the relationship between senate malapportionment and the allocation of the US federal budget to the states during the period 1978-2002. A substantial literature originating from the influential paper by ?) finds that small and overrepresented states get significantly larger shares of...

This paper explores the consequences of creating and improving property rights so that fixed assets can be used as collateral. This has become a cause célèbre of Hernando de Soto whose views are influential in debates about policy reform concerning property rights. Hence, we refer to the...

This paper studies the incidence of civil war over time. We put forward a canonical model of civil war, which relates the incidence of conflict to circumstances, institutions and features of the underlying economy and polity. We use this model to derive testable predictions and to interpret the...

This chapter develops a unified analytical framework, drawing on and extending the existing literature on the subject, for studying the role of property rights in economic development. It addresses two fundamental and related questions concerning the relationship between property rights and...

This paper argues that there is nothing anomalous about the flypaper effect. I develop a simple median voter model of government spending with costly tax collection that predicts the flypaper effect and provide a quantifiable measure of its magnitude. Using the model insights and previous...

Tenured public officials such as judges are often thought to be indifferent to the concerns of the electorate and, as a result, potentially lacking in discipline but unlikely to pander to public opinion. We investigate this proposition empirically using data on promotion decisions taken by...

The independent National Equality Panel was set up in October 2008 at the invitation of the Rt. Hon. Harriet Harman MP, Minister for Women and Equality. The Panel was asked to investigate the relationships between the distributions of various kinds of economic outcome on the one hand and...

Bajari, Benkard and Levin (2007) propose an estimation methodology for a broad class of dynamic optimization problems. To carry out their procedure, one needs to select a set of alternative policy functions and compare the implied expected payoffs with that from the data. We show that this can...

We propose a general two-step estimation method for the structural parameters of popular semiparametric Markovian discrete choice models that include a class of Markovian Games and allow for continuous observable state space. The estimation procedure is simple as it directly generalizes the...

Acemoglu, Johnson, & Robinson (2002) have claimed that the world income distribution underwent a Reversal of Fortune from 1500 to the present, whereby formerly rich countries in what is now the developing world became poor while poor ones grew rich. We question their analysis with regard to both...