Boondoggles, Rent-Seeking, and Political Checks and Balances: Public Investment under Unaccountable Governments
研究发现，治理质量低、政治制衡弱或缺乏竞争性选举的国家，公共投资显著更高，最可能的解释是政府借此扩大寻租。这对评估弱治理国家的公共投资增长效应有警示意义。
We show that public investment is dramatically higher in countries with low-quality governance and limited political checks and balances or no competitive elections. This result is robust to a number of specifications. The most plausible interpretation of these results is that these governments use public investment as a vehicle to increase their rent-seeking. This evidence suggests that efforts to increase public investment in countries with weak governance, or to measure the growth effects of productive public investment using only observed measures of public investment, should be undertaken with caution. Copyright by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.