The government provision of free or subsidized bed nets to combat malaria in Benin allows the identification of new channels through which mass media affect public policy outcomes. Prior research has concluded that governments provide greater private benefits to better-informed individuals. This...

Broad consensus exists that the ability of political actors to make credible commitments is key to development. An important and little-explored determinant of the credibility of political commitments is the existence of organizations that facilitate citizen collective action to sanction...

Does radio access improve public service provision? And if so, does it do so by increasing government accountability to citizens, or by persuading households to take advantage of publicly-provided services? Prior research has argued that citizens with greater access to mass media receive greater...

Much of the research on ethnicity, development and conflict implicitly assumes that ethnic groups act collectively in pursuit of their interests. Collective political action is typically facilitated by political parties able to make credible commitments to pursue group interests. Other work,...

The authors demonstrate that sharply different policy choices across democracies can be explained as a consequence of differences in the ability of political competitors to make credible pre-electoral commitments to voters. Politicians can overcome their credibility deficit in two ways. First,...

This paper identifies systematic performance differences between younger and older democracies: younger democracies are more corrupt; exhibit less rule of law, lower levels of bureaucratic quality, and lower secondary school enrollments; and spend more on public investment and government...

The authors develop and test several new hypotheses about the anti-inflationary effect of central bank independence and exchange rate pegs in the context of different institutions and different degrees of citizen information about government policies. Theory provides strong reason to believe...

The author reviews how three pillars of political economy-collective action, institutions, and political market imperfections-help us answer the question: Why do some countries develop and others do not? Each makes tremendous advances in our understanding of who wins and who loses in government...

Keefer reviews progress made in understanding the effects of different dimensions of governance on economic development, and the sources of good governance. The term governance has been used to embrace concepts that are heterogeneous both with respect to their effects on economic development and...

The author proposes a new approach to explain why the costs of crisis are greater in some countries than in others. He begins with the premise that many crises result from the willingness of politicians to cater to special interests, at the expense of broad social interests. A parsimonious model...