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"Morrison, Kevin M"
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Nontaxation and representation : the fiscal foundations of political stability
\"Does oil make countries autocratic? Can foreign aid make countries democratic? Does taxation lead to representation? In this book, Kevin M. Morrison develops a novel argument about how government revenues of all kinds affect political regimes and their leaders. Contrary to conventional wisdom, Morrison illustrates that taxation leads to instability, not representation. With this insight, he extends his award-winning work on nontax revenues to encompass foreign aid, oil revenue, and intergovernmental grants and shows that they lead to decreased taxation, increased government spending, and increased political stability. Looking at the stability of democracies and dictatorships as well as leadership transitions within those regimes, Morrison incorporates cross-national statistical methods, formal modeling, a quasi-experiment, and case studies of Brazil, Kenya and Mexico to build his case. This book upends many common hypotheses and policy recommendations, providing the most comprehensive treatment of revenue and political stability to date\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Oil, Nontax Revenue, and the Redistributional Foundations of Regime Stability
Nontax revenues make up a substantial amount of government revenue around the world, though scholars usually focus on individual sources of such revenue (for example, foreign aid and state-owned oil companies). Using a theory of regime change that builds on recent models of the redistributional foundations of dictatorships and democracies, I generate hypotheses regarding all nontax revenue and regime stability. I argue that an increase in nontax revenue should be associated with less taxation of elites in democracies, more social spending in dictatorships, and more stability for both regime types. I find support for all three of these hypotheses in a cross-sectional time-series analysis, covering all countries and years for which the necessary data are available. Significantly, I show that the particular source of nontax revenue does not make a difference: they all act similarly with regard to regime stability and the causal mechanisms.
Journal Article
The Impact of Intergovernmental Transfers on Education Outcomes and Poverty Reduction
This paper provides regression discontinuity evidence on development impacts of intergovernmental transfers. Extra transfers in Brazil increased local government spending per capita by about 20 percent over a 4 year period with no evidence of crowding out own revenue or other revenue sources. Schooling per capita increased by about 7 percent and literacy rates by about 4 percentage points. In line with the effect on human capital the poverty rate was reduced by about 4 percentage points. Somewhat noisier results also suggest that the reelection probability of local incumbent parties in the 1988 elections improved by about 10 percentage points.
Journal Article
What Can We Learn about the \Resource Curse\ from Foreign Aid?
A large body of literature has arisen in economics and political science analyzing the apparent \"resource curse\"—the tendency of countries with high levels of natural resources to exhibit worse economic and political outcomes. The author examines the purported causal mechanisms underlying this \"curse\" and shows that they all center on the revenue that these resources generate for the government. As such, it is not surprising that the most recent literature on the topic has demonstrated that, in the hands of a competent government, natural resources have no negative consequences and may actually have positive effects. The important question therefore is: What can be done in countries without effective governments? Policy proposals have centered on (a) taking the resources out of the hands of the government or (b) having the government commit to use the funds in certain ways. Neither of these has been particularly successful, which we might have predicted from research on another important nontax revenue source for developing countries: foreign aid. The close parallels between the foreign aid and \"resource curse\" literatures are reviewed, as are the lessons from the aid literature. These lessons suggest the need for an important change in approach toward poorly governed resource-rich countries.
Journal Article
Membership no longer has its privileges: The declining informal influence of Board members on IDA lending
This paper examines the ability of Board members of the most important multilateral donor to developing countries, the International Development Association (IDA) of the World Bank, to influence IDA allocations toward their home countries. I show that a system of Bank staff ratings of individual countries' policies, which has become more important in IDA lending over time, has systematically reduced the informal power of Board members. I show that while IDA Board members received more IDA commitments than their counterparts prior to 1989, this influence has disappeared since, as the importance of the policy index has increased. The findings are robust to the inclusion of fixed effects and a variety of relevant controls. In order to further support my argument, I also investigate the influence of Board membership on the Bank's policy index itself. I am unable to establish any positive relationship between Board membership and the index, either during the Cold War or afterwards. The findings not only shed important light on the internal workings of World Bank allocations to poor countries, but also highlight the ways in which institutional designs can affect the balance of informal power in international institutions.
Journal Article
Natural Resources, Aid, and Democratization: A Best-Case Scenario
Natural resources and aid give dictators revenue to maintain power. Attempts are being made, therefore, to funnel these resources away from nondemocratic governments and toward their citizens. Using formal analysis and building on existing theories of democratization, I analyze the effects of such institutional solutions when they function perfectly (the best-case scenario). The models show that even with institutional safeguards, these resources diminish chances for democratization. In addition to their practical importance, the results have an important theoretical implication: the political resource curse may not be due to dictators' use of these resources, but simply to their existence in nondemocracies.
Journal Article
IAP antagonists induce anti-tumor immunity in multiple myeloma
Blockade of cIAP1 and cIAP2 induces a tumor cell-autonomous type-I IFN response that activates myeloid cells and potentiates anti-tumor immunity in pre-clinical models and patients with multiple myeloma.
The cellular inhibitors of apoptosis (cIAP) 1 and 2 are amplified in about 3% of cancers and have been identified in multiple malignancies as being potential therapeutic targets as a result of their role in the evasion of apoptosis. Consequently, small-molecule IAP antagonists, such as LCL161, have entered clinical trials for their ability to induce tumor necrosis factor (TNF)-mediated apoptosis of cancer cells. However, cIAP1 and cIAP2 are recurrently homozygously deleted in multiple myeloma (MM), resulting in constitutive activation of the noncanonical nuclear factor (NF)-κB pathway. To our surprise, we observed robust
in vivo
anti-myeloma activity of LCL161 in a transgenic myeloma mouse model and in patients with relapsed-refractory MM, where the addition of cyclophosphamide resulted in a median progression-free-survival of 10 months. This effect was not a result of direct induction of tumor cell death, but rather of upregulation of tumor-cell-autonomous type I interferon (IFN) signaling and a strong inflammatory response that resulted in the activation of macrophages and dendritic cells, leading to phagocytosis of tumor cells. Treatment of a MM mouse model with LCL161 established long-term anti-tumor protection and induced regression in a fraction of the mice. Notably, combination of LCL161 with the immune-checkpoint inhibitor anti-PD1 was curative in all of the treated mice.
Journal Article
What Can We Learn about the “Resource Curse” from Foreign Aid?
A large body of literature has arisen in economics and political science analyzing the apparent “resource curse”—the tendency of countries with high levels of natural resources to exhibit worse economic and political outcomes. The author examines the purported causal mechanisms underlying this “curse” and shows that they all center on the revenue that these resources generate for the government. As such, it is not surprising that the most recent literature on the topic has demonstrated that, in the hands of a competent government, natural resources have no negative consequences and may actually have positive effects. The important question therefore is: What can be done in countries without effective governments? Policy proposals have centered on (a) taking the resources out of the hands of the government or (b) having the government commit to use the funds in certain ways. Neither of these has been particularly successful, which we might have predicted from research on another important nontax revenue source for developing countries: foreign aid. The close parallels between the foreign aid and “resource curse” literatures are reviewed, as are the lessons from the aid literature. These lessons suggest the need for an important change in approach toward poorly governed resource-rich countries.
Journal Article
Whither the Resource Curse?
What is it about oil? Whereas one might think that countries that produce the world's energy have it good, much scholarship has come to the conclusion that countries that produce oil have it bad: they are worse off economically and politically than they would otherwise be. This counter-intuitive idea has become so widespread that the “resource curse” is often discussed in popular outlets, from Thomas Friedman to Stephen Colbert. And yet scholarship is increasingly questioning whether this curse actually exists. After several decades of research on the topic, we still do not have a clear idea what it is about oil—if anything—that causes problems.
Journal Article
When Public Goods Go Bad: The Implications of the End of the Washington Consensus for the Study of Economic Reform
A principal approach to theorizing about economic reform in developing countries has been to assume that market-oriented policies have the properties of public goods, in that their benefits are widespread and their costs concentrated. This article reviews several books, one of them
from the World Bank, that suggest that skepticism about these policies has entered the mainstream, calling into question this benchmark approach to reform. In the context of ongoing debate over which policies are best for developing countries, the review offers a framework for future study
of reform, arguing that while past work has yielded important insights into how societal divisions and institutional characteristics affect reform, these insights now need to be combined with scholarship on how governments learn and form preferences about policies.
Journal Article