Powerful local elites are quite common in developing countries. Thus, whether decentralization reduces or not the level of corruption in the presence of these elites is a relevant issue for these economies. We motivate this paper with some empirical evidence. Using cross-country information we...

This paper presents a model demonstrating how trust affects the volume of trade in a society. There are two ways in which this happens. First, at minimum, societies need a certain level of trust in order to observe trading activity. Second, once this minimum condition is satisfied, the...

This paper studies whether a government party always prefers to negotiate with another compact party rather than with many different parties in a legislature. We claim that the interaction between ideological polarization and number of parties plays an important role in this decision. We start...

The literature has come to no agreement about the empirical validity of the so-called weak government hypothesis. According to this hypothesis, political fragmentation should lead to higher government expenditure. With the aim of reconciling the empirical evidence with theory, in this paper we...

In this paper, we study how between-group wealth and size heterogeneity affectsuccess probabilities as well as aggregate rent-seeking efforts when two groups compete for the allocation of a pure public good. Unlike with previous models, we measure the utility cost of rent-seeking in terms of the...