We analyze the causal effect of the stock of foreigners residing in a country on the probability of a terrorist attack in that country. Our instrument for the stock of foreigners relies on the interactions of two sets of variables. Variation across host-origin-dyads results from structural...

Past research has provided evidence of clientelistic politics in delivery of programme benefits by local governments, or gram panchayats (GPs), and manipulation of GP programme budgets by legislators and elected officials at upper tiers in West Bengal, India. Using household panel survey data...

This paper attempts to model the relationship between economic growth and democratization, with an emphasis on non-linearities. I adopt and explore the concept of “political capital” as a measure of democracy, which is extremely uncommon in the literature and brings considerable advantages...

What is the impact of campaign spending on votes? Does it vary across election types and across political parties? Estimating these effects requires comprehensive data on spending across candidates, parties and elections, as well as identification strategies that successfully deal with the...

This article studies the causal effect of electoral systems on fiscal outcomes using an empirical design exploiting a discontinuity in the application of electoral rules in Polish municipalities in the period 2002-2014. In that period, municipalities followed either majoritarian or proportional...

Domar (1970) has singled out the land/labor ratio as the main cause of both slavery and serfdom. But he then recognizes that scarcity of labor is necessary but not sufficient for serfdom to exist, and that an exogenous political factor is required to determine the status of labor.I show that in...

This paper analyses intergovernmental transfers in France and Italy to assess how soft budget spending behaviors may result from slacks in institutional constraints or from phenomena related to political culture, like administrative practices or implementation of rules. It innovates on the...

Bribes can either put "grease" or "sand" in the wheels of commerce, affecting firm performance (at the micro-level) and, ultimately, economic growth (at the macro-level). These two opposing hypotheses on the role corruption plays in countries with weak institutions raise an important empirical...

Securing central bank independence (CBI) is considered a vital and common practice in a large number of countries, since this independence is often associated with favorable economic performance, and it isolates monetary policy from the distortions of political business cycles, associated with...

This study uses panel Granger causality and cointegration tests to examine the relationship between income per capita and control of corruption in the Eurozone. The analysis covers the entire Eurozone and subgroups of countries from 2002 to 2021. The results show that there is not a...