Tim Besley

Position:
School Professor of Economics and Political Science;
Visiting Professor, IIES Stockholm

Research Interests: Public Economics, Development Economics, Political Economy.

Contact Details

• Tel: 44-(0)20-7955-6702
• Email: t.besley@lse.ac.uk
• Room number: R527
• PA: Amy Marsden, Tel: 44-(0) 20-7852-3564

Selected Publications
Current Working Papers
Data
Books
Mirrlees Review
Miscellanea
CV
Short Biography
Teaching
Former Students
Other Professional Activities
Personal Details

Selected Publications

[If you are looking for one of my papers, please try http://ideas.repec.org/e/pbe46.html]

• "Public Provision of Private Goods and the Redistribution of Income" (with Stephen Coate), American Economic Review, 81, September 1991: 979-984. Technical Material
  
  
• "Decentralizing Public Good Supply" (with Ian Jewitt), Econometrica, 59, 6, November 1991: 1769- 1777.
  
  
• "Workfare versus Welfare: Incentive Arguments for Work Requirements in Poverty Alleviation Programs" (with Stephen Coate), American Economic Review, 82, 1, March 1992: 249- 261.
  
  
• "The Economics of Rotating Savings and Credit Associations" (with Stephen Coate and Glenn Loury), American Economic Review, 83, 4, September 1993: 792-810.
  
  
• "Thy Neighbor's Keeper: The Design of a Credit Cooperative with Theory and a Test" (with Abhijit Banerjee and Timothy Guinnane), Quarterly Journal of Economics, May 1994: 491-515.
  
  
• "Rotating Savings and Credit Associations, Credit Markets and Efficiency" (with Stephen Coate and Glenn Loury), Review of Economic Studies, 61, 4, October 1994: 701-719.
  
  
• "Incumbent Behavior: Vote Seeking, Tax Setting and Yardstick Competition" (with Anne Case), American Economic Review, 85, 1, March 1995: 25-45.
  
  
• "The Design of Income Maintenance Programs" (with Stephen Coate), Review of Economic Studies, 62, 2, April 1995: 187-221.
  
  
• "Does Electoral Accountability Affect Economic Policy Choices? Evidence from Gubernatorial Term Limits" (with Anne Case), Quarterly Journal of Economics, 110, 3, August 1995: 769-798.
  
  
• "Property Rights and Investment Incentives: Theory and Evidence from Ghana." Journal of Political Economy, 103, 5, 1995: 903-937.
  
  
• "An Economic Model of Representative Democracy", (with Stephen Coate), Quarterly Journal of Economics, 108(1), 85-114, 1997.
  
  
• "Sources of Inefficiency in a Representative Democracy: A Dynamic Analysis," (with Stephen Coate), American Economic Review, 88(1), 139-156, 1998.
  
  
• "Land Reform, Poverty Reduction and Growth: Evidence from India" (with Robin Burgess), Quarterly Journal of Economics 115 (2) 389-430, May 2000 [Data available from EOPP Indian Stata Database]
  
  
• "Lobbying and Welfare in a Representative Democracy" (with Stephen Coate),Review of Economic StudiesVol 68 (1), 67-82C, 234, January 2001.
  
  
• "Government versus Private Ownership of Public Goods" (with Maitreesh Ghatak), Quarterly Journal of Economics, November 2001, volume 116, issue 4, pages 1443-1372.
  
  
• "The Political Economy of Government Responsiveness: Theory and Evidence from India" (with Robin Burgess), Quarterly Journal of Economics, November 2002, 117(4), 1415-1452. [Data available from EOPP Indian Stata Database]
  
  
• "Can Labor Regulation Hinder Economic Performance? Evidence from India" (with Robin Burgess) Quarterly Journal of Economics, 19(1), 91-134 [Data available from EOPP Indian Stata Database]
  
  
• "Political Institutions and Policy Choices: Evidence from the United States" (with Anne Case) Journal of Economic Literature, March 1993, 41(1), 7-73.
  
  
• Competition and Incentives with Motivated Agents
  (with Maitreesh Ghatak), American Economic Review, 95(3), 616-636, 2005.
  
  
• "Handcuffs for the Grabbing Hand?: Media Capture and Government Accountability" (with Andrea Prat), American Economic Review, 96(3), 720-736, 2006
  
  
• Electoral Bias and Policy Choice: Theory and Evidence (with Ian Preston) Quarterly Journal of Economics, 122(4), 1473-1510, 2007
  
  
• The Origins of State Capacity: Property Rights, Taxation and Politics (with Torsten Persson), American Economic Review, 99(4), 1218-44, 2009.
  
  
• State Capacity, Conflict and Development (with Torsten Persson) Econometrica, 78, 1-34, 2010
  
  
• Political Competition and Economic Performance: Evidence from the United States (with Torsten Persson and Daniel Sturm) Review of Economic Studies, 77(3), 1329-1352, 2010
  
  
• The Logic of Political Violence (with Torsten Persson) Quarterly Journal of Economics forthcoming
  
  
• Estimating the Peace Dividend: The impact of violence on house prices in Northern Ireland (with Hannes Mueller) American Economic Review forthcoming
  
  
• Incentives and the de Soto Effect (with Konrad Burchardi and Maitreesh Ghatak) Quarterly Journal of Economics forthcoming. (The Online Appendix to the paper is available here)

Current Working Papers

[If you are looking for one of my papers, please try http://ideas.repec.org/e/pbe46.html]

(The following papers can be viewed or downloaded in Acrobat format.)

• Taxation and Development (with Torsten Persson)
  
  
• The Welfare Cost of Lawlessness: Evidence from Somali Piracy (with Thiemo Fetzer and Hannes Mueller)
  
  
• The Legacy of Historical Conflict Evidence from Africa (with Marta Reynal-Querol)
  
  
• Political Turnover and Institutional Reform: Theory and Evidence (with Torsten Persson)
  
  
• The Regulation of Land Markets: Evidence from Tenancy Reform in India (with Jessica Leight, Rohini Pande and Vijayendra Rao)
  
  
• Pension Fund Governance and the Choice Between Defined Benefit and Defined Contribution Plans (with Andrea Prat)
  
  
• Judicial Accountability and Economic Policy Outcomes: Evidence from Employment Discrimniation Charges (with A. Abigail Payne)
  
  
• Electoral Strategy and Economic Policy
  
  
• Household External Finance and Consumption (with Neil Meads and Paolo Surico)
  
  
• Are Public Sector CEOs Different? Leadership Wages and Performance in Schools
  (with Stephen Machin)
  
  
• Accoutability and incentives: The impacts of different regimes on hospital waiting times in England and Wales (with Gwyn Bevan and Konrad Burchardi)
  
  

Data

• Health and Democracy (with Masayuki Kudamatsu)
• Data from Halving Global Poverty (with Robin Burgess), published in the Journal of Economic Perspectives 2003.
• EOPP Indian Stata Database with Robin Burgess

Books

Principled Agents? The Political Economy of Good Government

To purchase the book in the UK customers should use: http://www.oup.com/uk/catalogue/?ci=9780199271504

To purchase the book in the USA customers should use: http://www.oup.com/us/catalog/general/subject/Economics/Political/?view=usa&ci=9780199271504

Pillars of Prosperity: The Political Economics of Development Clusters, Princeton University Press (with Torsten Persson)

Further information: Pillars of Prosperity

To purchase the book from Amazon, click here.

Mirrlees Review

Mirrlees Review. Reforming the tax system for the 21st century Institute for Fiscal Studies

I was member of the Mirrlees Review team.

Miscellanea

Giving my Walras Bowley Lecture at the Econometric Society World Congress at UCL in August 2005.

• Old Unpublished Papers:
  • Peer Group Externalities and Learning Incentives: A Theory of Nerd Behaviour with Abhijit V. Banerjee, December 1991
  • Monitoring and Wage Incentives: Capitulation vs Efficiency Wages with John McLaren, December 1990
    
    
• Health and Democracy (with Masayuki Kudamatsu)
  A shorter version of this paper was published in American Economic Review, Papers and Proceedings, May, 2006
  
  
• The New Political Economy A paper based on Keynes Lecture in Economics, 2004
  
  
• Economics for An Imperfect World: Remarks prepared for a panel on Development and Transition at A Conference for Joe Stiglitz's 60th Birthday, Columbia University.
  
  
• Review of Economic Studies Lecture Notes - These notes were prepared for the Review of Economic Studies lecture that I gave in Warwick in 1998 and were used subsequently for a course (GV 507) taught at the LSE in Michaelmas term 1999.
  
  
• Royal Economic Society Easter School (April 2004)
  
  
• "Welfare Economics and Public Choice"
  published in the Encyclopaedia of Public Choice,
  edited by Charles Rowley, Kluwer Academic Publishers March 2003
  
  
• "Elected versus Appointed Regulators"
  published in the Encyclopaedia of Public Choice,
  edited by Charles Rowley, Kluwer Academic Publishers March 2003
  
  
• Introductory chapter to Development Challenges in the 1990s: Leading Policy Makers Speak From Experience edited by Timothy Besley and Roberto Zagha for the World Bank
  
  
• Political Institutions and Policy Competition These notes were written for a workshop for the 2001 World Development Report in Institutions
  
  
• Issue Unbundling via Citizens' Initiatives: Appendix (with Stephen Coate) This paper was published in the Quarterly Journal of Political Science, 2008: Volume 3, issue 4. The Appendix to the paper which was not published and is available here.
  
  
• Making Autocracy Work (with Masa Kudamatsu) This is a longer version of a paper that was published in "Institutions and Economic Performance", edited by Elhanan Helpman, Harvard University Press, 2008. The longer version mainly contains a more extensive literature review.
  
  
• Transition and Transition Impact (with Mathias Dewatripont and Sergei Guriev) A report written for the EBRD
  
  

Teaching

• EC428 Development and Growth
• EC513 Public Economics for Research Students
• EC515 Development and Growth for Research Students

Former Students

• John McLaren, Departent of Economics, University of Virginia
• Sanjay Jain, Department of Economics, University of Virginia
• Abigail Payne, Department of Economics, McMaster University.
• Imran Rasul, Graduate School of Business, University of Chicago
• Rohini Pande, Department of Economics, Yale
• Cecilia Testa, Department of Economics, Royal Holloway
• Marta Reynal-Querol, World Bank
• Lupin Rahman, IMF
• Franque Grimard, Department of Economics, McGill
• Valentino Larcinese, Department of Government, LSE
• Jean-Paul Faguet, DESTIN, LSE

Other Professional Activities

Vice President, International Economic Association
Research Fellow, Public Policy Programme CEPR
Associate Editor, Journal of Development Economics
Associate Editor, Review of Development Economics
Associate Editor, International Tax and Public Finance
President (2004-7) and Board Member, the Bureau for Research in the Economic Analysis of Development (BREAD)
Member of the Economic Growth and Institutions Program of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIAR)
Founding member of the organizing committee of Public Economics UK

Personal Details

Married to Gillian Paull, with two sons:

Thomas, born 1995	Oliver, born 1997

Degrees:
BA, from Keble College, Oxford in PPE (first class)
DPhil, from Oxford University