In Geng, Weiss, and Wol (2011), we pointed to the possibility that a voting mechanism may create or strengthen an entitlement e ect in political-power holders relative to a random-appointment mechanism. This comment documents that such an e ect, if it exists, is not robust.

We present a simple theory of the quality (competence and honesty) of elected officials. Our theory offers three main insights. Low-quality citizens have a ‘comparative advantage’ in pursuing elective office, because their market wages are lower than those of high-quality citizens (competence), and/or because they reap higher returns from holding office (honesty). Hence, voters may find themsel...

I analyze equilibria in an infinite-horizon model of elections with a twoperiod term limit in the presence of adverse selection and moral hazard. The focus is on responsiveness of policy choices of first-term politicians. In equilibrium, office holders’ policy choices are ordered by type; politicians exert positive effort in the first term of office; and as politicians become highly office moti...

Arrangements for sharing political power serve three purposes: to give all relevant groups access to important political decisions; to partition the policy process, thereby granting groups relevant autonomy; and to constrain holders of political power from abusing authority. A new global dataset of political power sharing institutions, 1975–2010, is introduced here, disaggregated these along th...

This paper investigates the private returns to colonial offices and how these affect longterm economic and political outcomes across sub-national provinces in Peru. To estimate the private returns to office I use a unique dataset of the prices at which colonial government positions were auctioned off by the Spanish Crown between 1674 and 1751. I first show how the gap between the prices paid fo...

This paper develops the empirical and theoretical case that differences in economic institutions are the fundamental cause of differences in economic development. We first document the empirical importance of institutions by focusing on two "quasi-natural experiments" in history, the division of Korea into two parts with very different economic institutions and the colonization of much of the w...

Post-authoritarian Indonesia has shown some sub-national political leaders fell from power before their first term while others have survived through it. I argue that the durability of these leaders is influenced by two factors: strategy of extraction and populist policy. Sub-national leaders need to extract in order to collect resources and in turn finance political strategies to maintain thei...