We examine whether the Colombian government’s expansion of publicly provided health insurance in the early nineties created incentives for people to become informal. Using variation in the onset of the Census of the Poor across municipalities and over time, we find robust and consistent estimates of an increase in informal employment between 2 and 5 percentage points after the expansion. As rob...

Policy interest since the early 1980s has focused in different ways on the creation of a large, productive, taxable economy – in which entrepreneurship plays a role for employment, income growth and innovation. The current understanding of various forms of entrepreneurship remains incomplete, focusing largely on productive and unproductive entrepreneurship. However, destructive entrepreneurship...

Corruption has fierce impacts on economic and societal development and is subject to a vast range of institutional, jurisdictional, societal and economic conditions. Research indicates that corruption’s predominantly negative effects have arisen to a massive trans-border threat while creating high obstacles to sustainable and prospective development, ultimately impairing everybody’s life. This ...

Do political elites use armed groups to foster civilian participation in genocidal violence? Are employed strategically? How do they mobilize civilians? I investigate these questions using data from the Rwandan Genocide. To establish causality, exploit exogenous variation groups’ transport costs induced by weather fluctuations: shortest distance of each village main road interacted with rainfal...

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...

We study the interaction between product quality, prices and demand in a dynamic model of asymmetric information. Sellers choose between producing high quality goods which gives low profits today but increases probability of future survival in the market and low quality ones which gives higher returns today but lowers future survival. However, demand depends on expected quality. Multiple steady...

This chapter surveys the new institutional economics, a rapidly growing literature combining economics, law, organization theory, political science, sociology and anthropology to understand social, political and commercial institutions. This literature tries to explain what institutions are, how they arise, what purposes they serve, how they change and how they may be reformed. Following conven...

Many lament that weak accountability and poor governance impede economic development in Africa. Politicians rely on ethnic allegiances that deliver the vote irrespective of performance, dampening electoral incentives. Giving voters information about candidate competence counters ethnic loyalty and strengthens accountability. I extend a canonical electoral model to show how information provision...