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WORKING PAPERS
February 23, 2024
As the politics of polarization gain traction and electoral support, a new vintage of populism is emerging in Latin America. This new version shares some aspects with the type of cultural populism now common in advanced economies that divides societies into antagonistic camps. But there are also imp...
WORKING PAPERS
May 02, 2023
Wage inequality in the public sector is an important determinant of the effectiveness of anti-corruption policies. Increasing the wages of public officials could help reduce corruption in countries with low public sector wage inequality, but in countries where public sector wages are highly unequal,...
WORKING PAPERS
June 25, 2022
We use new, detailed oil data and an event-study design to analyze political change in 36 oil-producing countries that experienced at least 10 years of declining production. We find that when their production starts to decline, they become significantly more democratic, relative to both the overall ...
WORKING PAPERS
June 13, 2017
Public employees in many developing economies earn much higher wages than similar private-sector workers. These wage premia may reflect an efficient return to effort or unobserved skills, or an inefficient rent causing labor misallocation. To distinguish these explanations, we exploit the Kenyan gov...
WORKING PAPERS
December 20, 2016
Regulatory pressure on international banks to fight money laundering (ML) and terrorist financing (TF) increased substantially in the past decade. We find countries that have been added to a high-risk greylist face up to a 10% decline in the number of cross border payments received from other jurisd...
WORKING PAPERS
September 13, 2016
Governments buy about $9 trillion worth of goods and services a year, and their procurement policies are increasingly subject to international standards and institutional regulation. Using a database of World Bank financed contracts, we explore the impact of a relatively minor procurement rule gove...
WORKING PAPERS
August 15, 2016
Elections have emerged as a leading area for the application of biometric technology in developing countries, despite its high costs and uncertainty over its effectiveness. This paper finds that a reduction in the probability of post-election violence by only a few percentage points could offset the...
WORKING PAPERS
August 31, 2015
There are two dominant narratives about taxation. In one, taxes are the “price we pay for a civilized society” (Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.). In this view taxes are not a necessary evil (as in the pairing of “death and taxes” as inevitable) but a positive good: more...