We study the relationship between two sources of political power and property tax revenues in contemporary rural Colombia. First, de jure political power is the extent to which local political elites can capture the public ...

In November 2008, Colombian authorities dismantled a network of Ponzi schemes, making hundreds of thousands of investors lose tens of millions of dollars throughout the country. Using original data on the geographical ...

Recent empirical evidence at the cross-country and subnational levels suggests that internal conflicts harm state capacity and tax performance. On the face of it this is odd: internal conflict should create strong incentives ...

This paper investigates the relationship between economic inequality and crime in Colombian municipalities. Following recent scholarly research that suggests that the legacy of slavery is largely manifest in persistent ...

We study whether the existence of opportunities to extract rents in a job affects the type of individuals who are attracted to it. We design a laboratory experiment in which individuals choose between two contracts, each ...