This paper relates unique data on criminal records of local politicians in India to corruption, crime and poverty. Using a regression discontinuity design, whereby individuals living in districts where a criminal politician barely won are compared to individuals living in districts where a...

A key element of government is to uphold law and order. This paper will evaluate the impact of slow judiciaries on entrepreneurship. In 2002 a judicial reform was implemented in 6 of Pakistan's 117 districts to facilitate rapid case disposal. Drawing on a panel dataset of 875 district judges'...

This paper attempts to measure the causal impact of the speed of judiciaries on economic activity by using two novel instrumental variables measuring judicial procedural ambiguity and complexity. First, I find that temporally exogenous conflicting judicial decisions taken in India due to the...

This paper examines the consequences of slow judiciaries on firms' contracting behaviour in India. After deriving testable implications from a game theoretical model, I examine how case pendency rates in India's state courts affect the contracting behaviour of 170,000 small non-agricultural...

This paper investigates the impact of judiciaries on firms' contracting behaviour and economic performance. In 2002, the Code of Civil Procedure Amendment Act was enacted in India to facilitate speedy disposal of civil suits. Some State High Courts hal already enacted some of the amendments...

This paper looks at an institutional innovation in which Western investors lend peer-to-peer to poor country enterprises. Using a unique dataset from an online lending platform called MyC4, we find that MyC4’s Western lenders grant lower interest rates to pro-poor, socially responsible (SR),...

We followed field workers administering a household survey over a 12-week period and examined how their reciprocal behavior towards the employer responded to a sequence of exogenous wage increases and wage cuts. To disentangle the effects of reciprocal behavior from other explicit incentives...