We study the effect of financial disclosure on the selection of politicians, exploiting the staggering of Indian state assembly elections to identify the effect of disclosure laws. We document a 13 percentage point increase in exit of winning candidates post-disclosure, indicating that disclosure has a large effect on politician self-selection. This selection coincides with higher probability o...

A dictator issues an order, but the order is not carried out. The dictator does not know whether the order failed because the agent behaved opportunistically, or because his order contained some mistake. Imperfect information creates his dilemma: whether to punish the agent, or assist her or both. This paper models the dictator’s intervention when an order fails. The analysis links the dictator...

Government ownership of banks is very common in countries other than the United States. This paper provides cross-country, bank-level empirical evidence about political influences on these banks. It shows that government-owned banks increase their lending in election years relative to private banks. This effect is robust to controlling for country-specific macroeconomic and institutional factor...

This paper examines the effects of performance incentives in a federal job training program for the economically disadvantaged. A natural experiment that exogenously varies the incentives that government workers face allows me to identify incentive responses, which I find are consistent with a simple model of organizational behavior. Additionally, I show that the program’s incentive designers h...

Heavily subsidizing essential health products through existing health infrastructure could substantially improve health in sub-Saharan Africa. There is, however, widespread concern that poor governance – in particular, limited health worker accountability – seriously undermines the effectiveness of subsidy programs. Using innovative audits of targeted bed net distribution programs in Ghana, Ken...

During the last decade unicameral proposals have been put forward in fourteen US states. In this paper we analyze the effects of the proposed constitutional reforms, in a setting where decision making is subject to ‘hard time constraints’, and lawmakers face the opposing interests of a lobby and the electorate. We show that bicameralism might lead to a decline in the lawmakers’ bargaining power...

Stricter laws require more incisive and costlier enforcement. Because enforcement activity depends both on available tax revenue and the honesty of officials, the optimal legal standard of a benevolent government is increasing in per capita income and decreasing in officials’ corruption. In contrast to the “tollbooth view” of regulation, the standard chosen by a self-interested government is a ...

How is economic policy made? In this paper we study a key determinant of the answer to the question: lobbying by firms. Estimating a binary choice model of firm behavior, we find significant evidence for the idea that barriers to entry induce persistence in lobbying. The existence of these costs is further confirmed in studying how firms responded to a particular policy change: the expiration o...

We examine a new dataset of public procurement laws, practice, and outcomes in 187 countries. measure regulation as restrictions on the discretion procuring entities. find that laws practice are highly correlated with each other across countries, better is outcomes, but themselves not outcomes. A closer look shows stricter correlate improved only countries low sector capacity. present model whi...