Economic Accountability in Central America

Campaign Promises, Economic Performance, and Electoral Accountability in Latin America

Economic Growth under Political Accountability

We examine the impact of political and criminal accountability on economic growth. Governments seek to maximize their own consumption by extracting rents that are costly to growth. When citizens are able to depose politicians through elections, governments are tightly controlled. The rents politicians are able to extract increase in the length of their term. The effect of the threshold of crimi...

Discipline, Accountability, and Legislative Voting in Latin America

Accountability in legislative representation implies that candidates communicate to voters what they will do if elected, that information about actions once in office is available to constituents, that representatives are responsive to the preferences and demands of constituents, and that they are punished for lack of responsiveness. There is an inherent tension between party discipline and res...

Yellow Fever in Central America

The Economic Consequences of Electoral Accountability Revisited

This paper revisits the impact of electoral accountability on total state expenditure and tax revenue with panel data from the 48 continental U.S. states from 1950 to 1999. Besides examining “traditional” tests of sensitivity, we present estimates from a difference-in-differences propensity score matching model (DD PSM) and a parametric difference-in-differences-in-differences approach (DDD) th...