How have labor market institutions and welfare-state transfers affected jobs and productivity in Western Europe, relative to industrialized Pacific Rim countries? Many studies have tackled this question, with mixed and often unclear results. This paper proposes an eclectic comparative economic...

Income and wealth inequality rose over the first 150 years of U.S. history. They may have risen at times in Britain before 1875. The first half of this century equalized pre-fisc incomes more in Britain than in America. From the 1970s to the 1990s inequality rose in both countries, reversing...

The debate over whether political democracy is the least bad regime, as Churchill once said, remains unresolved because history has been ignored or misread, and because recent statistical studies have not chosen the right tests. Using too little historical information, and mistaking formal...

The econometric consensus on the effects of social spending confirms a puzzle we confront in the raw data: There is no clear net GDP cost of high tax-based social spending on GDP, despite a tradition of assuming that such costs are large. This paper offers five keys to this free lunch puzzle....

In many nations today the state has little capability to carry out even basic functions like security, policing, regulation or core service delivery. Enhancing this capability, especially in fragile states, is a long-term task. Countries like Haiti or Liberia will take many decades to reach even...

Many reform initiatives in developing countries fail to achieve sustained improvements in performance because they are merely isomorphic mimicry - that is, governments and organizations pretend to reform by changing what policies or organizations look like rather than what they actually do. The...

There is an inherent tension between implementing organizations - which have specific objectives and narrow missions and mandates - and executive organizations - which provide resources to multiple implementing organizations. Ministries of finance/planning/budgeting allocate across ministries...

The prevailing aid orthodoxy works well enough in stable environments, but is ill-equipped to navigate contexts of volatility and fragility. The orthodox approach is adept at solving straightforward technical or logistical problems (paving roads, building schools, immunizing children), but often...

The incredibly low levels of learning and the generally dysfunctional public sector schooling systems in many (though not all) developing countries are the result of a capability trap (Pritchett et al. 2010). Two phenomena reinforce persistent failure of schooling systems to produce adequate...

When are developing countries able to initiate periods of rapid growth and why have so few of these countries been able to sustain growth over decades? Deals and Development: The Political Dynamics of Growth Episodes seeks to answer these questions and many more through a novel conceptual...