Publications by Type: Unpublished

Models of nomination politics in the US often …find "gridlock" in equilibrium because of the super-majority requirement in the Senate for the confo…rmation of presidential nominees. A blocking coalition often prefers to defeat any nominee. Yet empirically nominations are successful. In the present paper we explore the possibility that senators can be induced to vote contrary to their nominal (gridlock-producing) preferences through contributions from the president and/or lobbyists, thus breaking the gridlock and con…forming the nominee. We model contributions by the president and lobbyists according to whether payment schedules are conditioned on the entire voting pro…file, the vote of a senator, or the outcome. We analyze several extensions to our baseline approach, including the possibility that lobbyists may …find it more productive to offer inducements to the president in order to affect his proposal behavior, rather than trying to induce senators to vote for or against a given nominee.

We consider the consequences of the Senate electoral cycle and bicameralism for distributive politics, introducing the concept of contested credit claiming, i.e. that members of a state’s House and Senate delegations must share the credit for appropriations that originate in their chamber with delegation members in the other chamber. Using data that isolates appropriations of each chamber, we test a model of the strategic incentives contested credit claiming creates. Our empirical analysis indicates that the Senate electoral cycle induces a back-loading of benefi…ts to the end of senatorial terms, but that the House blunts this tendency with countercyclical appropriations. Our analysis informs our understanding of appropriations earmarking, and points a way forward in studying the larger consequences of bicameral legislatures.

Is inequality harmful for economic growth? Is the underdevelopment of Latin America related to its unequal distribution of wealth? A recently emerging consensus claims not only that economic inequality has detrimental effects on economic growth in general, but also that differences in economic inequality across the American continent during the 19th century are responsible for the radically different economic performances of the north and south of the continent. In this paper we investigate this hypothesis using unique 19th century micro data on land ownership and political office holding in the state of Cundinamarca, Colombia. Our results shed considerable doubt on this consensus. Even though Cundinamarca is indeed more unequal than the Northern United States at the time, within Cundinamarca municipalities that were more unequal in the 19th century (as measured by the land gini) are more developed today. Instead, we argue that political rather than economic inequality might be more important in understanding long-run development paths and document that municipalities with greater political inequality, as measured by political concentration, are less developed today. We also show that during this critical period the politically powerful were able to amass greater wealth, which is consistent with one of the channels through which political inequality might affect economic allocations. Overall our findings shed doubt on the conventional wisdom and suggest that research on long-run comparative development should investigate the implications of political inequality as well as those of economic inequality.

In this paper we exploit the invasion of Europe, particularly Germany, by French Revolutionary armies as a ‘natural experiment’to investigate the causal effect of the institutions of the ancien régime on economic development. A central hypothesis which can account for comparative development within Europe is that economic growth emerged …first in places which earliest escaped ancien régime and feudal institutions. However, though there is a correlation between these two events, this does not demonstrate that it was the collapse of the ancien régime that caused the rise of capitalism. This is because there may be problems of reverse causation and omitted variable bias. We show how the institutional reforms (essentially the abolition of the ancien régime) brought by the French in Germany can be exploited to resolve these problems. These reforms were akin to an exogenous change in institutions unrelated to the underlying economic potential of the areas reformed. We can therefore compare the economic performance of the areas reformed to those not reformed before and after the Revolutionary period to examine the impact of the reforms. The evidence we present is consistent with the hypothesis that the institutions of the ancien régime did indeed impede capitalism.

In this paper I discuss what Mexico can learn from the economic and political history of the United States about how to facilitate the creation of a dynamic innovative industrial economy. The challenges facing Mexico are how to overcome the institutional and economic overhang from the long period of one-party rule under the PRI. Though democracy has finally arrived, the form that this rule took has in many ways shaped the initial conditions in which the new democracy must function. Of these many conditions, key ones are the very unequal distribution of power and wealth that arose during this period. These inequalities were not simply a coincidence, they were a natural outcome of the strategy that the PRI used to consolidate and sustain its power (see Haber, Klein, Maurer and Middlebrook, 2006). Why and how do these inequalities matter for the future economic prospects of Mexico? I illustrate the issues at stake by an analysis of two critical periods in the history of the United States. One, the US South after the Civil War, is a period of failed reform. The other, the Populist and Progressive movements from around 1880 to1920, is an experience of successful reform. In both instances the main issue was whether not to tackle critical inequalities of power and influence. In the U.S. South the victorious North abandoned the attempt to challenge the real power structures after 1877. In consequence the Southern economy stagnated for the next 80 years and a highly unequal and divisive system perpetuated itself. The story during the Progressive era was different. The Federal state challenged the "Robber Barons," monopolies and political bosses who engaged in endemic political fraud and corruption. These interventions helped to sustain the dynamic nature of the Northern and Midwestern economy and facilitated rapidly falling inequality over the subsequent half century.

This paper revisits and critically reevaluates the widely-accepted modernization hypothesis which claims that per capita income causes the creation and the consolidation of democracy. We argue that existing studies …find support for this hypothesis because they fail to control for the presence of omitted variables. There are many underlying historical factors that affect both the level of income per capita and the likelihood of democracy in a country, and failing to control for these factors may introduce a spurious relationship between income and democracy. We show that controlling for these historical factors by including …fixed country effects removes the correlation between income and democracy, as well as the correlation between income and the likelihood of transitions to and from democratic regimes. We argue that this evidence is consistent with another well-established approach in political science, which emphasizes how events during critical historical junctures can lead to divergent political-economic development paths, some leading to prosperity and democracy, others to relative poverty and non-democracy. We present evidence in favor of this interpretation by documenting that the …fixed effects we estimate in the post-war sample are strongly associated with historical variables that have previously been used to explain diverging development paths within the former colonial world.

We model the current system of refugee protection based on the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees as a Pareto improving contract that bound states to provide a more efficient level of the global public good of refugee protection. Our analysis suggests that the increase in economic migration since the 1951 Convention was adopted has made it more difficult for host states to distinguish between refugees and those who migrate in search of economic opportunities. The response of states to this screening problem has been to shade on performance of their obligations under the 1951 Convention by, inter alia, increasing the standards of proof of their refugee status determination procedures, resulting in more false negatives and refoulement of refugees. We show that the choice of standard of proof can exhibit strategic complementarity; as more states use a high standard of proof, the best response of other states may be to increase their standard of proof. We also model potential reform schemes in which wealthy states pay poorer states to host refugees that initially travel to the wealthy states, and argue that such transfer systems could ameliorate the screening problem by inducing self-selection among those who migrate and result in increased protection of refugees. However, such reforms could also make some developing countries worse-off by increasing their burden of hosting refugees without fully compensating them for their increased costs.

This paper examines how increased voter ethnicization, defined as a greater preference for the party representing one's ethnic group, affects politician quality. If politics is characterized by incomplete policy commitment, then ethnicization reduces average winner quality for the pro-majority party with the opposite true for the minority party. The effect increases with greater numerical dominance of the majority (and so social homogeneity). Empirical evidence from a survey on politician corruption that we conducted in North India is remarkably consistent with our theoretical predictions.

Most countries prohibit the export of certain antiquities. This practice often leads to illegal excavation and looting for the black market, which damages the items and destroys important aspects of the archaeological record. We argue that long-term leases of antiquities would raise revenue for the country of origin while preserving national long-term ownership rights. By putting antiquities into the hands of the highest value consumer in each period, allowing leases would generate incentives for the protection of objects.

The lack of "social capital" is increasingly forwarded as an explanation for why communities perform poorly. Yet, to what extent can these community-specific constraints be compensated? I address this question by examining determinants of collective success in a costly problem in developing economies—the upkeep of local public goods. One difficulty is obtaining reliable outcome measures for comparable collective tasks across well-defined communities. In order to resolve this I conduct detailed surveys of community-maintained infrastructure projects in Northern Pakistan. The findings show that while community-specific constraints do matter, they can be compensated by better project design. Inequality, social fragmentation, and lack of leadership in the community do have adverse consequences but these can be overcome by changes in project complexity, community participation and return distribution. Moreover, the evidence suggests that better design matters even more for communities with poorer attributes. Using community fixed effects and instrumental variables offers a significant improvement in empirical identification over previous studies. These results offer evidence that appropriate design can enable projects to succeed even in “bad” communities.

We develop two methods of automated content analysis that give approximately unbiased estimates of quantities of theoretical interest to social scientists. With a small sample of documents hand coded into investigator-chosen categories, our methods can give accurate estimates of the proportion of text documents in each category in a larger population. Existing methods successful at maximizing the percent of documents correctly classified allow for the possibility of substantial estimation bias in the category proportions of interest. Our first approach corrects this bias for any existing classifier, with no additional assumptions. Our second method estimates the proportions without the intermediate step of individual document classification, and thereby greatly reduces the required assumptions. For both methods, we also correct statistically, apparently for the first time, for the far less-than-perfect levels of inter-coder reliability that typically characterize human attempts to classify documents, an approach that will normally outperform even population hand coding when that is feasible. These methods allow us to measure the classical conception of public opinion as those views that are actively and publicly expressed, rather than the attitudes or nonattitudes of the populace as a whole. To do this, we track the daily opinions of millions of people about President Bush and the candidates for the 2008 presidential nominations using a massive data set of online blogs we develop and make available with this article. We also offer easy-to-use software that implements our methods, which we also demonstrate work with many other sources of unstructured text.

A randomized evaluation suggests that a program which provided official textbooks to randomly selected rural Kenyan primary schools did not increase test scores for the average student. In contrast, the previous literature suggests that textbook provision has a large impact on test scores. Disaggregating the results by students’ initial academic achievement suggests a potential explanation for the lack of an overall impact. Textbooks increased scores for students with high initial academic achievement and increased the probability that the students who had made it to the selective final year of primary school would go on to secondary school. However, students with weaker academic backgrounds did not benefit from the textbooks. Many pupils could not read the textbooks, which are written in English, most students’ third language. The results are consistent with the hypothesis that the Kenyan education system and curricular materials are oriented to the academically strongest students rather than to typical students. More generally, many students may be left behind in societies that combine 1) a centralized, unified education system; 2) the heterogeneity in student preparation associated with rapid expansion of education; and 3) disproportionate elite power.

We describe some progress toward a common framework for statistical analysis and software development built on and within the R language, including R’s numerous existing packages. The framework we have developed offers a simple unified structure and syntax that can encompass a large fraction of statistical procedures already implemented in R, without requiring any changes in existing approaches. We conjecture that it can be used to encompass and present simply a vast majority of existing statistical methods, regardless of the theory of inference on which they are based, notation with which they were developed, and programming syntax with which they have been implemented. This development enabled us, and should enable others, to design statistical software with a single, simple, and unified user interface that helps overcome the conflicting notation, syntax, jargon, and statistical methods existing across the methods subfields of numerous academic disciplines. The approach also enables one to build a graphical user interface that automatically includes any method encompassed within the framework. We hope that the result of this line of research will greatly reduce the time from the creation of a new statistical innovation to its widespread use by applied researchers whether or not they use or program in R.

Verbal autopsy procedures are widely used for estimating cause-specific mortality in areas without medical death certification. Data on symptoms reported by caregivers along with the cause of death are collected from a medical facility, and the cause-of-death distribution is estimated in the population where only symptom data are available. Current approaches analyze only one cause at a time, involve assumptions judged difficult or impossible to satisfy, and require expensive, time consuming, or unreliable physician reviews, expert algorithms, or parametric statistical models. By generalizing current approaches to analyze multiple causes, we show how most of the difficult assumptions underlying existing methods can be dropped. These generalizations also make physician review, expert algorithms, and parametric statistical assumptions unnecessary. With theoretical results, and empirical analyses in data from China and Tanzania, we illustrate the accuracy of this approach. While no method of analyzing verbal autopsy data, including the more computationally intensive approach offered here, can give accurate estimates in all circumstances, the procedure offered is conceptually simpler, less expensive, more general, as or more replicable, and easier to use in practice than existing approaches. We also show how our focus on estimating aggregate proportions, which are the quantities of primary interest in verbal autopsy studies, may also greatly reduce the assumptions necessary, and thus improve the performance of, many individual classifiers in this and other areas. As a companion to this paper, we also offer easy-to-use software that implements the methods discussed herein.

Applications of modern methods for analyzing data with missing values, based primarily on multiple imputation, have in the last half-decade become common in American politics and political behavior. Scholars in these fields have thus increasingly avoided the biases and inefficiencies caused by ad hoc methods like listwise deletion and best guess imputation. However, researchers in much of comparative politics and international relations, and others with similar data, have been unable to do the same because the best available imputation methods work poorly with the time-series cross-section data structures common in these fields. We attempt to rectify this situation. First, we build a multiple imputation model that allows smooth time trends, shifts across cross-sectional units, and correlations over time and space, resulting in far more accurate imputations. Second, we build nonignorable missingness models by enabling analysts to incorporate knowledge from area studies experts via priors on individual missing cell values, rather than on difficult-tointerpret model parameters. Third, because these tasks could not be accomplished within existing imputation algorithms, in that they cannot handle as many variables as needed even in the simpler cross-sectional data for which they were designed, we also develop a new algorithm that substantially expands the range of computationally feasible data types and sizes for which multiple imputation can be used. These developments also made it possible to implement the methods introduced here in freely available open source software that is considerably more reliable than existing algorithms.

The inability of developing countries to absorb and retain capital has long puzzled observers. The unanticipated events of 9/11 simultaneously led to a surge in capital flow into Pakistan, and an increase in aggregate demand. Yet despite rising deposit to loan ratios and precipitous fall in cost of capital, banks showed remarkable hesitancy to expand firm credit. We use quarterly firm-level data on debt capacity limits on all actively borrowing firms in Pakistan to show that debt capacity constraints led to the limited absorptive capacity of financial sector. Consistent with debt capacity hypothesis, “financial slack” positively predicts credit growth, and this predictability shoots up immediately following 9/11. This financial slack effect is stronger within industries receiving larger demand shocks, stronger within smaller firms, and completely absent for firms that do not face debt capacity constraints due to ex-ante lax regulation. A number of tests show that our results are unlikely to be driven by unobserved firm quality or expected changes in loan demand. Tentative estimates put the economy wide costs of these debt capacity constraints at 2.3% of GDP.

With an estimated one hundred and fifteen million children not attending primary school in the developing world, increasing access to education is critical. Resource constraints limit the extent to which demand based subsidies can do so. This paper focuses on a supply-side factor—the availability of low cost teachers—and the resulting ability of the market to offer affordable education. We use data from Pakistan together with official public school construction guidelines to present an Instrumental Variables estimate of the effect of government school construction on private school formation. We find that private schools are three times more likely to emerge in villages with government girls’ secondary schools. In contrast, there is little or no relationship between the presence of a private school and pre-existing girls’ primary, or boys’ primary and secondary schools. Moreover, there are twice as many educated women and private school teachers’ wages are 18 percent lower in villages that received a government girls’ secondary school. In an environment with poor female education and low mobility, government girls’ secondary schools substantially increase the local supply of skilled women. This lowers wages for women in the local labor market and allows the market to offer affordable education. These findings highlight the prominent role of women as teachers in facilitating educational access and resonates with similar historical evidence from developed economies—the students of today are the teachers of tomorrow.

Developing countries are marked by the prevalence of informal business networks. Many believe that these networks facilitate information sharing, trade, and contractual enforcement in weak institutional environments. However estimating network benefi…ts remains difficult due to data limitations, and identi…fication concerns. This paper uses ownership data on all (but the very small)private …firms in Pakistan to construct business networks involving 100,000 …firms. We link two …firms together if they have a director in common, and document the presence of a super-network in the economy. It comprises 5% of all …firms, is over a 100 times larger than the next largest network and obtains more than half of all bank credit. We then investigate the economic value that membership to the super-network brings by exploiting entry (exit) of …firms over time into the network. We identify the causal effect of network membership through a number of tests, including instrumenting network membership with “incidental” entry/exit of …firms. Network membership increases total external fi…nancing by 16.5%, reduces propensity to enter …financial distress by 9.7%, and better insures fi…rms against industry and location shocks. When forming new banking relationships, entering …firms are also more likely to select banks that already have existing relationships with adjoining …firms. We also …find that consistent with theories of strategic network development, benefi…ts of memberships are stronger when …firms connect through more powerful network nodes.

To explain trends in dowry levels in Bangladesh, we draw attention to a widespread institutional feature of marriage contracts previously ignored in the literature: the mehr or traditional Islamic brideprice, which functions as a prenuptial agreement in Bangladesh due to the default practice in which it is only payable upon divorce. We develop a model of marriage contracts in which mehr serves as a barrier to husbands from exiting marriage, in which dowry can be divided into a standard price component and a term that ex ante compensates grooms for the cost of mehr chosen by the couple. The contracts are welfare improving because they induce husbands to internalize the social costs of divorce for women. We investigate how mehr and dowry respond to exogenous changes in the costs of polygamy and divorce, and show that both decrease when costs of divorce increase for men. This is in contrast with the predictions of models in which dowry serves only the traditionally considered roles of price or bequest. To test the model’s predictions empirically, we use novel data collected on marriage contracts between 1956 and 2004 from a large household survey from the Northwest region of the country, and make use of key changes in Muslim Family Law between 1961 and 1999. We show that major changes in dowry levels took place precisely after the legal changes, corresponding to simultaneous changes in levels of mehr. We argue that the documented pattern of responses can only be explained if dowries include a component of compensation for mehr, hence our study provides strong evidence of the role of legal rules governing marital separation in explaining dowry trends in Bangladesh.