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Showing all content in Political Economy
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Data: Democracy and Income: A Time Series Analysis with Special Reference to Africa
Africa experienced a wave of democratization over the past 20 years and this increase in democracy, we find, positively and significantly affects income per capita. Our dynamic panel data results suggest that countries only slowly converge to their long-run income values as predicted by current democracy levels, however. African countries may therefore be currently too...
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Data: An experimental evaluation of Community Driven Reconstruction in northern Liberia: Follow up data entry and analysis
Civil war is very common in the developing world, with harmful welfare effects when it occurs. Many fear that the devastation wrought by violent confict destroys social capital, impedes economic development, and leads to the recurrence of violence (Paul Collier et al. 2003). In response, donors are injecting large amounts of aid into post-confict countries. A signifcant...
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Data: Peasants into Democrats? Evaluating the impact of information on local governance in Mali
I argue that if citizens systematically underestimate what their government can and should do for them, then they will hold politicians to a lower standard and sanction poor performers less often. A large-scale experiment across 95 localities in Mali in which some voters received information about potential government performance identifies eects of raising voter...
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Data: Clientelism and State Capacity: Persistence and Change in Sierra Leone and Colombia
We use the colonial organization of chieftaincy in Sierra Leone to study the e↵ect of constraints on chiefs’ power on economic outcomes, citizens’ attitudes and social capital. A paramount chief must come from one of the ruling families originally recognized by British colonial authorities. Chiefs face fewer constraints and less political competition in chiefdoms with...
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Data: Encouraging Seasonal Migration to Mitigate the Consequences of a Seasonal Famine in Rural Bangladesh
Hunger during pre-harvest lean seasons is widespread in the agrarian areas of Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. We randomly assign an $8.50 incentive to households in rural Bangladesh to out-migrate during the lean season. The incentive induces 22% of households to send a seasonal migrant, their consumption at the origin increases significantly, and treated households are 8-10...
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Data: Spatial Development and Local Technology
We present a theory of spatial development. Manufacturing and services frms located in a continuous geographic area choose each period how much to innovate. Firms trade subject to transport costs and technology diffuses spatially. We apply the model to study the evolution of the US economy in the last half-century and fnd that it can generate the reduction in the...
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Data: Managing bureaucracy to improve public service delivery
We study how the management practices under which public sector bureaucrats operate, correlate to the quantity and quality of public services delivered. We do so in a developing country context, exploiting data from the Nigerian Civil Service linking public sector organizations to the individual projects they are responsible for. For each of 4700 projects, we have hand...
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Data: Counteracting Illicit Behaviour During Elections: The Role of Observers and Cell Phones in a Field Experiment
African elections often reveal low levels of political accountability. We assess different forms of voter education during an election in Mozambique. Three interventions providing information to voters and calling for their electoral participation were randomized: an SMS-based information campaign, an SMS hotline for electoral misconduct, and the distribution of a free...
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Data: Political Violence in Pakistan: Understanding Subnational Patterns
Political violence has long been endemic in Pakistan, but the scale, scope, and geographic distribution of the problem has not been systematically studied. On the policy side, decision makers lack credible quantitative data with which to weigh the relative costs of politically-motivated violence against the many other challenges facing Pakistan. On the academic side,...
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Data: The impact of electronic procurement of public works contracts in Indonesia and India
Poorly functioning, and often corrupt, public procurement procedures are widely faulted for the low quality of infrastructure provision in developing countries. Can electronic procurement (e-procurement), which reduces both the cost of acquiring tender information and personal interaction between bidders and procurement ocials, ameliorate these problems? In this paper we...