The question of who guards the guards is intimately connected with broader questions of state capacity and the establishment of a monopoly of violence in society, something which is often viewed as the defining feature of the modern state. But to establish such a monopoly, civilian rulers need...

This paper uses village and household survey data from South India to examine how political geography and politician identity impacts on public good provision. We provide evidence that the nature of this relationship varies by type of public good. For high spillover public goods residential...

This paper proposes a simple framework to study incentives and matching in the market for teachers. The framework is used to investigate the consequences of introducing incentive pay for teachers when contracts have both a matching and an incentive effect. Our analysis suggests that school...

This paper looks at the theory behind the idea that paying politicians better will improve their performance. The paper lays out a political agency model with adverse selection and moral hazard where politicians are subject to two-period term limits. This model provides a number of predictions...

This paper contrasts direct election with political appointment of regulators. When regulators are appointed, regulatory policy becomes bundled with other policy issues the appointing politicians are responsible for. Because voters have only one vote to cast and regulatory issues are not salient...

We use household and village survey data from South India to examine who participates in village meetings called by elected local governments, and what effect these meetings have on beneficiary selection for welfare programs. Our main finding is that it is the more disadvantaged social groups...

The article builds a simple model to investigate how different types of armed conflict shape fiscal capacity: the state's ability to raise revenue from taxes. It starts from the simple observation that external war tends to generate common interests across groups in society, whereas internal,...