The past decade has witnessed exciting developments in the area of formal models of political economy and their application to issues concerning the organization of legislatures, voting behavior, information transmission, lobbies, corruption, comparative politics, the size and composition of government, to name only a few. These theoretical developments have been comparable to those in the area of theoretical industrial organization in the 1980s, and in analogous fashion it may be expected that they will pave the way for a wider range of applications and empirical research in the near future. These developments have great significance for both positive and normative economics, allowing economists to open the black box of the government sector: make predictions concerning the formulation of economic policies by governments and how they are affected by the nature of political institutions. In particular they have focused on propositions concerning how comparative political systems affect relevant aspects of government size, quality and policies.

The most significant application of this approach may be to gain an understanding of the role of political institutions in the process of economic development. The area of development economics has only recently begun to take institutions seriously, and the focus hitherto has been on structures of property rights, contracting and information problems, legal institutions and corporate governance. The study of the role of political institutions in the development process in contrast is in a state of relative infancy, which is beginning to pick up momentum. Some of the questions that have been addressed in the recent literature include the relation between democracy, inequality and growth; bureaucracies; political barriers to development-enhancing policies; corruption; fiscal decentralization; social capital; and political instability. Scholars from a large number of different disciplines, most notably political science, economics, and law, have been involved in this area. These research efforts have been motivated by the experience of developing countries in Latin America, Africa and Asia, though systematic empirical work on these countries is yet to emerge.

The purpose of the conference is to encourage the growth of the new discipline, allow researchers in the field to exchange ideas, and disseminate it to a wider audience.

The conference is organized by Leonard Wantchekon, Department of Political Science and Economic Growth Center, Yale University, (leonard.wantchekon@yale.edu); and Dilip Mookherjee, Department of Economics and Institute for Economic Development, Boston University (dilipm@bu.edu). It is open to the public.

8:30-10:00 Adam Przeworski (NYU):  Democracy as an Equilibrium. (Discussant: Peter Rosendorff, University of Southern California)

10:30-12:00 Daron Acemoglu (MIT), Simon Johnson and James Robinson:   Colonial Origins of Comparative Development: An Empirical Investigation. (Discussant: Ken Sokoloff, UCLA)

12:00-1.30 LUNCH

1:30-3:00 John Londregan (UCLA):   Common Law versus The Civil Code: The Silver Lining to Cloudy Judicial Standards. (Discussant: Tom Romer)

3.30-5:00 Leonard Wantchekon (Yale) and Etienne Yehoue:  Crime in New Democracies. (Discussant: Martin Wittenberg, Princeton)

5:00-6.30 Timothy Frye:  Private Protection in Russia and Poland: Roving or Stationary Bandit? (Discussant: John Londregan, UCLA)

Democracy and Government Responsiveness (Chair: Stephen Morris, Yale University)

8:30-10:00 Simeon Djankov, Caralee McLeish,Tatiana Nenova, and Andrei Shleifer (Harvard):  Who Owns the Media? (Discussant: Andrew Weiss, Boston University)

10:30-12:00 Timothy Besley and Robin Burgess (London School of Economics):   The Political Economy of Government Responsiveness: Theory and Evidence from India. (Discussant: Maitreesh Ghatak, University of Chicago)

1.30-3.00 Anandi Mani and Sharun Mukand (Tufts University):  Democracy and the Politics of Visibility. (Discussant: James Vreeland, Yale)

12:00-1.30 LUNCH

3:30-5:00 Jean-Jacques Laffont (University of Toulouse) and Jerome Pouyet:  The Subsidiarity Bias in Regulation. (Discussant: Yingyi Qian, University of Maryland)

5:30 -6:30. Hadi Esfahani (University of Illinois) and Stephanie Leaphart:  Testing the Political Economy Models of Trade Policy: A Generalized Methodology with an Application to Turkey...and Some New Results  (Discussant: Philip Levy, Yale)

6:30-8:00. RECEPTION

8:00 - 9.30  Pranab Bardhan and Dilip Mookherjee (Boston University):   Corruption and Decentralization of Infrastructure Delivery in Developing Countries. (Discussant: Susan Rose-Ackerman, Yale)

9:45 -11:15 Daniel Treisman (UCLA):  Decentralization and the Quality of Government. (Discussant: Jose Cheibub, Yale)