If property rights in land are so beneficial, why are they not adopted more widely? I propose a theory based on the idea that limited property rights over peasants' plots may be supported by elite landowners (who depend on peasants for labour) to achieve two goals. First, like other distortions...

We study the effect of links between politicians on corruption under prevailing clientelism. Connections between politicians increase fabricated "ghost" students to obtain more national transfers, without raising the quality or quantity of education. Bureaucratic turnover, temporary and...

Since the end of the Cold War, international third parties such as the United Nations (UN) have become frequent guarantors of peace agreements. Existing studies document that third parties provide assurances that help maintain peace, yet these studies nearly exclusively marshal evidence at the...

This paper constructs measures of the extent of ballot stuffing (fraudulent votes) and electoral coercion at the municipal level using data from Colombia's 1922 Presidential elections. Our main findings are that the presence of the state reduced the extent of ballot stuffing, but that of the...