Dictatorships do not survive by repression alone. Rather, dictatorial rule is often explained as an "authoritarian bargain" by which citizens relinquish political rights for economic security. The applicability of the authoritarian bargain to decision-making in non-democratic states, however,...

Arrangements by which politically connected firms receive economic favors are a common feature around the world, but little is known of the form or effects of influence in business–government relationships. We present a simple model in which influence requires firms to provide goods of...

We argue that the tilt toward donor interests over recipient needs in aid allocation and practices may be particularly strong in new partnerships. Using the natural experiment of Eastern transition we find that commercial and strategic concerns influenced both aid flows and entry in the first...

In this paper, we test the argument that the sizeable reduction in aggregate aid levels in the 1990s was due to the end of the Cold War. We test two different models using a dynamic econometric specification on a panel of 17 donor countries, spanning the years 1970-97. We find aid to be...

In this paper we look at the impact of broad policy reforms on the levels of corruption. We use a structural break approach to identify country-specific time periods in which significant shifts in corruption levels take place. We then correlate these times of change with a set of covariates with...

There has been relatively little investigation of the effect of constitutional transformations on the economic transition in post-communist countries. We develop a simple signalling model in which constitutionalism - a commitment to limit political power and provide judicial defence of basic...

When a government creates an agency to gather information relevant to policymaking, it faces two critical organizational questions: whether the agency should be given authority to decide on policy or merely supply advice, and what should the policy goals of the agency be. Existing literature on...