As is now well documented, aid is given for both political as well as economic reasons. The conventional wisdom is that politically-motivated aid is less effective in promoting developmental objectives. We examine the ex-post performance ratings of World Bank projects and generally find that...

We analyze the provision of infrastructure by a foreign investor when the domestic bureaucracy is corrupt, but puts some weight on domestic welfare. The investor may pay a bribe in return for a higher provisional contract price. After the investment has been sunk, the bureaucracy may hold up the...

We relate tax evasion behavior to a substantial literature on self and social comparison in judgements. Taxpayers engage in tax evasion as a means to boost their expected consumption relative to others in their "local" social network, and relative to past consumption. The unique Nash equilibrium...

We construct a simple model incorporating various urban labour market phenomena obtaining in developing economies. Our initial formulation assumes an integrated labour market and allows for entrepreneurship, self-employment and wage employment. We then introduce labour market segmentation. In...

The standard expected utility model of tax evasion predicts that evasion is decreasing in the marginal tax rate (the Yitzhaki puzzle). The existing literature disagrees on whether prospect theory overturns the puzzle. We disentangle four distinct elements of prospect theory and find loss...

This study investigates the effects of unfair enforcement of institutional rules on public good contributions, personal and social norms, and trust. In a preregistered online experiment (n = 1,038), we find that biased institutions reduce rule compliance compared to fair institutions. However,...

The psychological basis for rank-dependent probability weighting, and for an inverse-S probability weighting function (PWF) in particular, has often been questioned. I examine the existence and shape of the PWF in a model allowing for optimism/pessimism over probability distributions and for...

It has been known for centuries that the rich and famous have longer lives than the poor and ordinary. Causality, however, remains trenchantly debated. The ideal experiment would be one in which status and money could somehow be dropped upon a sub-sample of individuals while those in a control...

Using panel data for a maximum of 109 countries over the years 1976-2000, we empirically analyze the impact of decentralization on the occurrence of transnational terror. Our results show that expenditure decentralization reduces the number of transnational terror events in a country, while...

We analyze the spread of policies dealing with international trafficking in human beings. Arguing that countries are unlikely to make independent choices, we identify pressure, externalities and learning or emulation as plausible diffusion mechanisms for spatial dependence in anti-trafficking...