Cinema articulates the economic anxieties of each generation of filmmakers and audiences. It has an influence on people’s views on various economic issues and many orders of magnitude larger than that of economics as a discipline. This book offers a sweeping study of the representation of...

Numerous renegotiations have plagued water and transport concession contracts in Latin America. Using a panel dataset of over 300 concession contracts from Latin America between 1989 and 2000, we show that country-level corruption is a significant determinant of these renegotiations and that the...

This paper presents a meta-analysis of the infrastructure research done over more than three decades, using a database of close to a thousand estimates from 201 papers conducted between 1983-2022, reporting outcome elasticities. The analysis casts a wide net to include the transport, energy, and...

Policy makers have long used investing in public infrastructure as a means of reducing geographical disparities and promoting growth. The goal of this paper is to provide insights to development practitioners on designing interventions to maximize the development impact of infrastructure. For...

This paper presents an axiomatic characterization of difference-form group contests, that is, contests fought among groups and where their probability of victory depends on the difference of their effective efforts. This axiomatization rests on the property of Absolute Consistency, stating that...

This paper analyses the problem that an incumbent faces during the legislature when deciding how to react to citizen proposals such as the outcome of referenda or popular initiatives. We argue that these proposals constitute a potential source of electoral disadvantage when citizens factor in...

There is a growing literature looking at how men and women respond differently to competition. We contribute to this literature by studying gender differences in performance in a high-stakes and male dominated competitive environment, expert chess tournaments. Our findings show that women...