How can we design institutions to spark the flames of economic and political development?  In this workshop, we will take a two-pronged approach to speak to this question. The first approach concern, studying the institutions of rule of law. By studying legal reforms in weakly institutionalized settings, we will illuminate conditions necessary to establish rule of law in societies and build legal capacity. The second approach involves studying the requisite skills that civil servants require to build an effective state. Therefore, in this workshop we will speak to fundamental questions in development economics: how to build state capacity i.e., both legal and fiscal capacity, to overcome fragility and suboptimal allocation resources. The workshop will provide new research that uses start-of-the-art quasi-experimental and field experimental methods to provide insights on the design of institutions to promote economic development and build an effective state. 

References

1. Presidential Appointment of Judges. Reading VoxDev Article: https://voxdev.org/topic/institutions-political-economy/impact-presidential-appointment-judges-montesquieu-or-federalists
2. Judicial Capture by Gift Exchange. Reading full short paper: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1v0LVRfbigg9-RFVAlYqMzSShLqFk8g4e/view
3. Training Effective Altruism - 6 Minute Video Summary of the paper: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7EGEv5V2Aw4
4. Training Policymakers in Econometrics. Reading World Bank Summary: https://blogs.worldbank.org/impactevaluations/what-happens-when-you-train-senior-civil-servants-econometrics
5. Social Institutions and Gender Norms: http://users.nber.org/~dlchen/papers/Why_Are_Rights_Revolutions_Rare.pdf