Political representatives with criminal backgrounds are considered a great problem in many countries. In India in particular, the public disclosure of the large share of politicians currently facing criminal charges has sparked a heated public debate and emerging literature assessing the causes...

Among the many concerns over globalization is that as nations compete for mobile firms, they will relax labour standards as a method of lowering costs and attracting investment. Using spatial estimation on panel data for 148 developing countries over 18 years, we find that the labour standards...

Some propose that the rise of right-wing populism in many industrial democracies is due to economic insecurities stemming from globalization — the so-called “race to the bottom” argument. They suggest that greater social protection can cushion society from communal disharmony. Others...

The consequences of multinational corporations (MNCs) for human rights protection are poorly understood. We propose that the motives and behaviour of MNCs vary across industries. Extractive firms go where the resources are, which creates a status quo bias among them when it comes to supporting...

The bulk of social science theories explaining civil war focus on endogenous factors, generally ignoring the systemic effects of superpower rivalry during the Cold War. This study directly estimates US and Soviet rivalry by assessing the impact of CIA and KGB support to surrogates in proxy wars....

We investigate the role of oil wealth in economic institutions for a sample of 150 countries between 1960 and 2014. We find that higher levels of oil wealth result in weak economic institutions in the form of low levels of private property rights protection. This result is robust to alternative...

Current scholarship on civil wars and transitions from war to peace has made significant progress in understanding the political dimensions of internal conflict, but the economic motivations spurring political violence have been comparatively neglected. This pathbreaking volume identifies the...