Two prominent features in current world affairs are the unprecedented levels of global economic integration and the growing incidence of intrastate violence. We develop and test a novel argument linking foreign direct investment (FDI) to intrastate armed violence in developing countries. We...

This paper investigates empirically the political determinants of stock market development. We argue that those determinants are grounded in distributional cleavages among voters and interest groups. Our argument reverses the sign of the prevailing explanation about the role of partisanship in...

Personal income taxation remains relatively low in many developing countries despite recent democratic advancement and rapid economic growth; this is hard to reconcile with standard political economy models of taxation. This paper argues that the details of political institutions help to explain...

According to an influential theoretical argument, presidential systems tend to present smaller governments because the separation between those who decide the size of the fiscal purse and those who allocate it creates incentives for lower public expenditures. In practice, forms of government...

According to an influential theoretical argument, presidential systems tend to present smaller governments because the separation between those who decide the size of the fiscal purse and those who allocate it creates incentives for lower public expenditures. In practice, forms of government...