We complement the literature on distributive politics by taking a systematic look at regional favoritism in a large and diverse sample of countries and by employing a broad measure that captures the aggregate distributive effect of many different policies. In particular, we use satellite data on nighttime light intensity and information about the birthplaces of the countries’ political leaders. In our panel of 38,427 subnational regions from 126 countries with yearly observations from 1992 to 2009, we find that subnational regions have more intense nighttime light when being the birth region of the current political leader. We argue that this finding provides evidence for regional favoritism. We explore the dynamics and the geographical extent of regional favoritism and show that regional favoritism is most prevalent in countries with weak political institutions and poorly educated citizens. Furthermore, foreign aid inflows and oil rents tend to fuel regional favoritism in weakly institutionalized countries, but not elsewhere.

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Abstract. Natural hazards can be seen as a function of a specific natural process and human (economic) activity. Whereby the bulk of literature on natural hazard management has its focus on the natural process, an increasing number of scholars is emphasizing the importance of human activity in this context. Existing literature has identified certain socioeconomic factors that determine the impact of natural disasters on society. The purpose of this paper is to highlight the effects of the institutional framework that influences human behavior by setting incentives and to point out the importance of institutional vulnerability. Results from an empirical investigation of large scale natural disasters between 1984 and 2004 show that countries with better institutions experience less victims and lower economic losses from natural disasters. In addition, the results suggest a non-linear relationship between economic development and economic disaster losses. The suggestions in this paper have implications for the discussion on how to deal with the adverse effects of natural hazards and how to develop efficient adaption strategies.

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This article investigates whether the political leaders of aid-receiving countries use foreign aid inflows to further their own political or personal interests. Aid allocation biased by leaders' selfish interests arguably reduces the effectiveness of aid, negatively affecting development outcomes. We examine whether more Chinese aid is allocated to the political leaders' birth regions and regions populated by the ethnic group to which the leader belongs, controlling for objective indicators of need. We have collected data on 117 African leaders' birthplaces and ethnic groups and geocoded 1,955 Chinese development finance projects across 3,545 physical locations in Africa over the 2000-2012 period. The results from various fixed-effects regressions show that current political leaders' birth regions receive substantially larger financial flows from China than other regions. When we replicate the analysis for the World Bank, our regressions with region fixed effects show no evidence of favoritism. Once we control for region fixed effects, we do not find evidence that African leaders direct aid to areas populated by groups who share their ethnicity, for Chinese and World Bank aid alike.