How does the fragmentation of local governments affect economic activity? We examine this question in the context of a major period of government proliferation in Indonesia in which the number of districts increased by 50 percent from 2000 to 2014. Exploiting idiosyncratic variation in the...

Corruption is a problem that has been shown to adversely affect a country’s development. Recent studies have shown that a country’s electoral system can affect its corruption level. But if that is the case, then electoral rules could be chosen to maximize opportunities for corruption. This...

The paper written from a governance perspective takes the position that a useful governance perspective must be informed by the socio-economic-cultural milieu and in the specific Indian context must sit on a tripod of ‘political reality’, ‘state of decentralization’ and ‘basic economic...

Ever since the spectacular boom and bust cycle of the Spanish real estate industry, endemic corruption at the local level has become a widely recognized problem in the national public discourse. In an effort to expose an under-explored political determinant, this paper investigates the effect of...

The paper investigates the influence of outside options on the predatory behavior of autocrats. An outside option is referred to as the opportunity of an incumbent ruler to continue his career outside his current territory of control. The paper uses data on the effectiveness of tax collection...

The consequences of granting democratic rights to citizens in otherwise authoritarian regimes has been extensively studied. Much less is know about the implications of retracting these rights when a government wants to recentralize power. Autonomous governance in rural China, introduced in the...

We examine the human development consequences of transferring responsibility for public service provision to local governments in India, using state-level variation in the timing of administrative decentralization reforms. We find that devolution of the responsibility for health functions from...

We address the impact of corruption in a developing economy in the context of an empirically relevant hold-up problem - when a foreign firm sinks an investment to provide infrastructure services. We focus on the structure of the economy's bureaucracy, which can be centralized or decentralized,...

The paper studies the effect of additional government revenues on political corruption and on the quality of politicians, both with theory and data. The theory is based on a version of the career concerns model of political agency with endogenous entry of political candidates. The evidence...

In this paper we investigate the role of judicial control of lobbying activities in an endogenous policy framework, focusing on two dimensions of quality of the judiciary, namely efficiency and integrity. We present a multi-layer lobbying model where a self-interested group is allowed to inuence...