This paper presents theoretical and empirical evidence on the nexus between corruption and democracy. We establish a political economy model where the effect of democracy on corruption is conditional on income distribution and property rights protection. Our empirical analysis with cross-national panel data provides evidence that is consistent with the theoretical prediction. Moreover, the effe...

The Economic Costs of Mass Surveillance: Insights from Stasi Spying in East Germany* Based on official records from the former East German Ministry for State Security, we quantify the long-term costs of state surveillance on social capital and economic performance. Using county-level variation in the spy density in the 1980s, we exploit discontinuities at state borders to show that higher level...

The main questions which the literature on rule production by agencies and bureaucracies deals with are: To what extent should legislators delegate rule making to bureaucracy? How can procedural rules curb an agency’s discretion in making substantive rules? Do legislators select bureaucratic decisions for oversight randomly or on the basis of complaints? Who exactly controls bureaucracy: some a...

This paper is concerned with what the state buys and in particular the decision to shift from conventional government purchase and ownership of assets toward public-private partnerships, i.e. purchase of final services, leaving the private sector supplier to design, build and own the assets. The approach emphasizes the information and contractual nature of the problem, rather than residual cont...

We generalize the Diamond–Mirrlees production efficiency theorem, that there should be no taxes on sectors producing pure intermediate goods, to an environment with political economy constraints. In our economy, allocations and taxation are decided by self-interested politicians without the power to commit to future policies. The Diamond–Mirrlees production efficiency result holds even when pol...

o ne of the effective strategies for economic development of clusters is the conduct of networking activities by cluster members. indeed, the majority of cluster members are micro and small enterprises, so, should attempt to overcome their inherent constraints and influence the market through networking activities. in addition, these enterprises lack an intra-firm research and development unit ...

t his paper investigates the asymmetric behavior of inflation. we use logistic smooth transition autoregressive (lstar) model to characterize the regime-switching behavior of iran’s monthly inflation during the period may 1990 to december 2013. we find that there is a triple relationship between the inflation level, its fluctuations and persistence. the findings imply that the behavior of infla...

abstract i n this paper, we investigate the existence and the nature of real exchange rate misalignment in organization of the petroleum exporting countries (opec). to do this we estimated a cross country basic real exchange rate determination model for 1990-2012 and extracted historic trend of misalignment. the results imply that all opec countries have had misalignment -of different kinds tho...

JEL Classification Code(s): J 31, J 71) "Perceptions of Discrimination, Effort to Obtain Psychological Balance, and Relative Wages: Can We Infer a Happiness Gradient?" There is a substantial literature that finds a linkage between happiness and relative economic well being as measured by earnings or wages. There is also a well documented racial gap in wages. One explanation for this is disparat...