Individuals and Organizations as Sources of State Effectiveness

We are grateful to editor Esther Duflo and two anonymous referees for comments that substantially improved the paper. We also thank Ben Olken for his very helpful discussion of the paper at the AEA meetings, and John M. Abowd, Daron Acemoglu, Hunt Allcott, Tim Besley, Nick Bloom, Richard Blundell, Raj Chetty, Allan Collard-Wexler, Francesco Decarolis, Andres Drenik, Pascaline Dupas, Ben Faber, Fred Finan, Matthew Gentzkow, Josh Gottlieb, Caroline Hoxby, Amit Khandelwal, Brad Larsen, David Margolis, Torsten Persson, Andrea Prat, Imran Rasul, Jimmy Roberts, Jonah Rockoff, Tobias Salz, Orie Shelef, Andrei Shleifer, David Silver, Eric Verhoogen, Guo Xu, and Danny Yagan for valuable comments; Andrei Yakovlev for institutional guidance; Andrey Druzhaev, Len Goff, Vinayak Iyer, and Georgiy Syunyaev for outstanding research assistance; and seminar participants at the AEA meetings, U.C. Berkeley, University of British Columbia, Central European University, Columbia, University of Copenhagen, Duke, the Econometric Society, Harvard Business School, Higher School of Economics, McGill, University of Michigan, the NBER Development Economics Program meeting, NEUDC, NYU, Northwestern, University of Oslo, Paris School of Economics, Santa Clara, Stanford, UCL, UCLA, University of Toronto, University of Virginia, and the World Bank for comments. Best thanks the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, where he was a postdoctoral fellow while much of the work on the paper was done. The study has been funded within the framework of the Basic Research Program at the National Research University Higher School of Economics (HSE) and by the Russian Academic Excellence Project “5-100”. All remaining errors are ours alone. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

• online appendix

• April 26, 2017
• December 27, 2018
• October 21, 2019