Prevailing work argues that foreign investment reduces corruption, either by competing down monopoly rents or diffusing best practices of corporate governance. We argue that this theory is too broad-brush and that the empirical work testing it is too heavily drawn from aggregations of total...

What do state-owned enterprises (SOEs) do? How do they respond to market incentives? Can we expect substantial efficiency gains from trade liberalization in economies with a strong presence of SOEs? Using a new dataset of Vietnamese firms we document a set of empirical regularities...

Purpose Single-party regimes increasingly use Subnational Performance Assessments (SPAs) - rankings of provinces and districts0 - to improve governance outcomes. SPAs assemble and publicize information on local government performance to facilitate monitoring and generate competition among...

Government corruption is more prevalent in poor countries than in rich countries. This paper uses cross-industry heterogeneity in growth rates within Vietnam to test empirically whether growth leads to lower corruption. We find that it does. We begin by developing a model of government...

With varying levels of intensity, Southeast Asian countries have been experimenting with different modes of decentralization for over two decades. Significant debate exists about the success of these efforts, and some countries have recently attempted to reverse these measures by recentralizing...