There has been a dramatic change in the division of responsibility betweenthe state and the private sector for the delivery of public goods and services inrecent years with an increasing trend toward contracting out to the private sectorand “public-private partnerships.” This paper analyzes...

The determinants of government responsiveness to its citizens are a key issue in political economy. Here, we develop a model based on the solution of political agency problems. Having a more informed and politically active electorate strengthens incentives for governments to be responsive. This...

In recent times there has been a renewed interest in relationships between redistribution, growth, and welfare. Land reforms in developing countries are often aimed at improving the poor's access to land, although their effectiveness has often been hindered by political constraints on...

This paper investigates whether the industrial relations climate in Indian states has affected the pattern of manufacturing growth in the period 1958-1992. We show that states which amended the Industrial Disputes Act in a pro-worker direction experienced lowered output, employment, investment,...

Tropical deforestation accounts for almost one-fifth of greenhouse gas emissions and threatens the world's most diverse ecosystems. Much of this deforestation is driven by illegal logging. We use novel satellite data that tracks annual deforestation across eight years of Indonesian institutional...

We characterize efficient technical languages and study their interaction with the scope and structure of organizations. Efficient languages use precise words for frequent events and vague words for unusual ones. A broader organizational scope allows for more synergies to be captured, but...

This paper develops an approach to studying how bias in favor of one party due to the pattern of electoral districting affects policy choice. We tie a commonly used measure of electoral bias to the theory of party competition and show how this affects party strategy in theory. The usefulness of...

This paper analyzes the behavior of U.S. governors from 1950 to 1986 to investigate a reputation-building model of political behavior. The authors argue that differences in the behavior of governors who face a binding term limit and those who are able to run again provides a source of variation...

This paper develops an approach to the study of democratic policy-making where politicians are selected by the people from those citizens who present themselves as candidates for public office. The approach has a number of attractive features. First, it is a conceptualization of a pure form of...

There has been a dramatic change in the division of responsibility between the state and the private sector for the delivery of public goods and services in recent years with an increasing trend toward contracting out to the private sector and "public-private partnerships." This paper analyzes...