Do Elections Matter?

Do Elections Always Motivate Incumbents?

This paper studies a principal-agent model of the relationship between o¢ceholders and the electorate, where the o¢ce-holder is initially uninformed about her ability (following Holmström, 1999). If o¢ce-holder e¤ort and ability interact in the “production function” that determines performance in o¢ce, then an o¢ce-holder has an incentive to experiment, i.e. raise e¤ort so that performance beco...

Do elections matter for private-sector healthcare management in Brazil? An analysis of municipal health policy

BACKGROUND This study analyzed several political determinants of increased private-sector management in Brazilian health care. In Brazil, the poor depend almost exclusively on the public Unified Health System (the SUS), which remains severely underfunded. Given the overhead costs associated with privately contracted health services, increased private management is one driver of higher expenditu...

Dark Chocolate and Metabolic Syndrome; Do Polyphenols All that Matter?

Do Workers\' Remittances Matter for the Egyptian Economy?

Workers’ remittances constitute one of the most important sources of external finance for many developing countries. Although it shows a decreasing trend in recent years, Egypt after 1970s with her regular and massive labor migration to abroad has been still one of the gainer countries on remittances across the world. Empirical studies that implemented for various countries reveal workers’ ...

Do Elections Select for Better Representatives?

Incumbents significantly outperform challengers in American elections, but the normative implications of this phenomenon are ambiguous. Do incompetent officials exploit the political system to keep themselves in power, or do open elections effectively select for good leaders? To address this question, I define and estimate three components of incumbent success in elections— (1) party match, (2)...