Bailouts sponsored by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) are famous for their conditionality: in return for continued installments of desperately needed loans, governments must comply with austere policy changes. Many have suggested, however, that politically important countries face rather...

We investigate whether temporary members of the United Nations Security Council receive favorable treatment from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) using panel data for 197 countries over the period from 1951 to 2004. Our results indicate a robust positive relationship between temporary...

We investigate whether elected members of the UN Security Council receive favorable treatment from the World Bank, using panel data for 157 countries over the period 1970-2004. Our results indicate a robust positive relationship between temporary UN Security Council membership and the number of...

Governments provide foreign aid for both political and economic reasons, as is now well documented. Conventional wisdom holds that political motivations lower the effectiveness of aid in promoting developmental objectives. We test this claim by focusing on a setting in which we observe...

This paper introduces new data on the term in office of central bank governors in 137 countries for 1970-2004. Our panel models show that the probability that a central bank governor is replaced in a particular year is positively related to the share of the term in office elapsed, political and...

Using new data on the term in office of central bank governors for a large set of countries for 1970-2005, we estimate a model for the probability that a central bank governor is replaced before the end of his legal term in office. We formulate hypotheses based on the literature on the...

There are many stories of democracy but little consensus over which variables robustly determine its emergence and survival. We apply extreme bounds analysis to test the robustness of 59 factors proposed in the literature, evaluating over 3 million regressions. The most robust determinants of...