Over the past two decades, we have seen an impressive expansion of quantitative work in comparative politics. The expanding edifice of quantitative cross-national political research, however, rests upon incomplete as well as insecure foundations of cross-national data. Despite the incessant…

Sabemos muy poco sobre la organización y el funcionamiento de los gobiernos estatales. Incluso información básica sobre recursos humanos, prácticas de gestión financiera y controles internos es escasa. Esta carencia es un freno al avance de la investigación, pero también…

En este trabajo se muestra que el efecto "flypaper" ha estado presente en las transferencias no condicionadas que han recibido los municipios en México durante el periodo de 1990 a 2007. Utilizando datos tipo panel, confirmamos que hay una sustitución…

How are committee leaders in legislatures chosen absent seniority norms? This paper argues that the prior political experience of legislators can serve as cues to caucus leaders to reduce adverse selection in a legislature where seniority cannot be the basis…

Procampo was launched in 1994 to help the transition from low productivity
activities to high productivity activities, among other policy objectives. We
investigate the effects of Procampo on migration flows from Mexico to third
countries (mainly the US), and the…

In this paper we investigate by Monte Carlo simulations the bias, mean square error, variance and distribution of estimators for bivariate GARCH models in small samples. The data generating process is a VAR (2) for the conditional mean together with…

When President Felipe Calderón took office he declared a war on drug lords, thus initiating a war of attrition which has claimed more than 40,000 lives in the last 5 years. In this paper I document how this escalation of…

This text uses the principle of proportionality to study the social, legal and moral justification of the current drug policy in Mexico. The text focuses on two senses of proportionality: relative and absolute. By relative proportionality, I refer to the…

Studies of authoritarian nations rarely consider the role and activities of regional officials. They are usually assumed to be the involuntary agents of national rulers, or the unwitting victims of local demands for political change. Instead, I argue that regional…

Why do some terrorist groups cooperate with each other, while others attack each other? Terrorist groups frequently interact. Emerging research shows that these network relationships have important consequences, but it remains unclear why some terrorist groups form ties with other…