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Revealing Malfeasance: How Local Media Facilitates Electoral Sanctioning of Mayors in Mexico

Snyder, James M. Snyder, Jr.; Larreguy, Horacio A.; … - National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) - 2014

We estimate the effect of local media outlets on political accountability in Mexico, focusing on malfeasance by municipal mayors. We study federal grants earmarked for infrastructure projects targeting the poor, and leverage two sources of plausibly exogenous variation. First, we exploit...

Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10011079880

Predictability and Power in Legislative Bargaining

Bernheim, B. Douglas; Ali, S. Nageeb; Fan, Xiaochen - National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) - 2014

This paper examines the relationship between the concentration of political power in legislative bargaining and the predictability of the process governing the recognition of legislators. Our main result establishes that, for a broad class of legislative bargaining games, if the recognition...

Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10010796681

Electoral Rules and the Quality of Politicians: Theory and Evidence from a Field Experiment in Afghanistan

Beath, Andrew; Christia, Fotini; Egorov, Georgy; … - National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) - 2014

We examine the effect of electoral rules on the quality of elected officials using a unique field experiment which induced randomized variation in the method of council elections in 250 villages in Afghanistan. In particular, we compare at-large elections, with a single multi-member district, to...

Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10010772574

Fiscal Federalism and Legislative Malapportionment: Causal Evidence from Independent but Related Natural Experiments

Galiani, Sebastian; Torre, Iván; Torrens, Gustavo - National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) - 2014

We exploit three natural experiments in Argentina in order to study the role of legislative malapportionment on the biased federal tax sharing scheme prevalent in the country. We do not find support to attribute it to legislative malapportionment during periods when democratic governments were...

Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10010969273

Conflict, Evolution, Hegemony, and the Power of the State

Levine, David; Modica, Salvatore - National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) - 2013

In a model of evolution driven by conflict between societies more powerful states have an advantage. When the influence of outsiders is small we show that this results in a tendency to hegemony. In a simple example in which institutions differ in their "exclusiveness" we find that these...

Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10010950707

Third-Party Opportunism and the Nature of Public Contracts

spiller, pablo t.; Moszoro, Marian W. - National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) - 2012

The lack of flexibility in public procurement design and implementation reflects public agents' political risk adaptation to limit hazards from opportunistic third parties - political opponents, competitors, interest groups - while externalizing the associated adaptation costs to the public at...

Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10010950960

Elections and the Quality of Public Officials: Evidence from U.S. State Courts

Snyder, James M. Snyder, Jr.; Lim, Claire S.H. - National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) - 2012

We investigate the influence of electoral rules and voter information in elections on voting outcomes and the quality of public officials, using new data on state court judge elections in 39 states in the U.S. from 1990 to 2010. We find, first, that voting is very partisan in partisan judicial...

Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10010951100

Autocracy, Democracy and Trade Policy

Galiani, Sebastian; Torrens, Gustavo - National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) - 2013

determination of a country's political regime, trade policy and income-tax-based redistribution scheme. Three socioeconomic groups … are involved: two elite groups and workers, whose preferences regarding trade policy and income taxation are derived from … a simple open-economy model. The critical point is that income taxation induces a rich-poor/elite-workers political …

Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10010951164

Electoral Accountability and Corruption: Evidence from the Audits of Local Governments

Ferraz, Claudio; Finan, Frederico - National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) - 2009

Political institutions can affect corruption. We use audit reports from an anti-corruption program in Brazil to construct new measures of political corruption in local governments and test whether electoral accountability affects the corruption practices of incumbent politicians. We find...

Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10004961458

Do Leaders Affect Government Spending Priorities?

Drazen, Allan; Brender, Adi - National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) - 2009

Since a key function of competitive elections is to allow voters to express their policy preferences, one might take it for granted that when leadership changes, policy change follows. Using a dataset we created on the composition of central government expenditures in a panel of 71 democracies...

Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005085211