If the price effect of opening up a developing economy may be expected to act as a disincentive for investment in human capital, the opposite is likely to be true of the income effect, especially in the presence of credit market imperfections among the poor. It is shown in this Paper that this...

Lack of access to finance is often cited as a key reason for why poor people remain poor. This Paper uses data on the Indian rural branch expansion programme to provide empirical evidence on this issue. Between 1977 and 1990, the Indian central bank mandated that a commercial bank could open a...

This Paper examines why developed countries are monogamous while rich men throughout history have tended to practice polygyny (multiple wives). Wealth inequality naturally produces multiple wives for rich men in a standard model of the marriage market where polygyny is not ruled out. Our model...

This paper suggests that inequality in the distribution of land ownership adversely affected the emergence of human capital promoting institutions (e.g., public schooling) and thus the pace and the nature of the transition from an agricultural to an industrial economy, contributing to the...

This paper starts from the observation that despite their very high levels of unemployment, major European countries have devoted few resources to reducing it. This suggests that there is little political concern about high unemployment. I develop a model where the government tries to increase...

In this paper, we present a citizen-candidate model of representative democracy with endogenous lobbying. We find that lobbying induces policy compromise and always affects equilibrium policy outcomes. In particular, even though the policy preferences of lobbies are relatively extreme, lobbying...

This paper proposes a simultaneous-equation approach to the estimation of the contribution of transport infrastructure accumulation to regional growth. We model explicitly the political-economy process driving infrastructure investments; in doing so, we eliminate a potential source of bias in...

This paper studies the distributive effects of growth when different agents' income is drawn from accumulated and non-accumulated factors of production in different proportions. It also notes that political interactions may contribute to determine factor shares and growth when income sources are...

In many situations the individuals who can generate some output must enter a contest for appropriating this output. This Paper analyses the investment incentives of such agents and the role of incumbency advantages in the contest. Depending on the advantages, an increase in the productivity of...

Private school students do not always perform better in standardized tests. We suggest that this may be explained by choice of private schooling by less capable students in countries where government schools are better suited to talented students. To assess the empirical relevance of this...