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"Creating Moves to Opportunity: Experimental Evidence on Barriers to Neighborhood Choice"

Misclassification between stillbirths and neonatal deaths in low-income countries

Buying Time with Children: Women’s Employment and Time-Intensive Parenting across the Life Course

Timing is Everything: Evidence from College Major Decisions

Who are LGBTQ People?: A Demographic Profile of a Growing Population

Sexual minority population health inequities across the life course: Where do we go from here?

When is Hope Enough? Hopefulness, Discrimination and Racial Disparities in Physiological Dysregulation

How demography is reshaping the global religious landscape

Migration, Urbanization, and Health: Insights from South Africa

We develop a simple dynamic model of policy reform that captures some of the determinants that underlie the differences between the reform paths taken by a number of countries since the early 1990s. The model focuses on the interaction between domestic institutions and international organizations that promote reform, on the one hand, and the political incentives for reversing reforms, on the other. At equilibrium, there are three types of reform paths. A country can undergo a full-scale, lasting reform, can carry out a partial but lasting reform, or can go through cycles of reforms and costly counter-reforms. Domestic institutions, along with the incentives provided by international organizations, determine the equilibrium path. A politically myopic international organization may induce cycles of reforms and costly counter-reforms, thereby reducing the country's well-being. An international organization that only provides funds to promote reforms may have a less beneficial effect than one that assists the country with fresh funds to defend reforms when there is a risk of reversal. International funds that promote reforms can also influence domestic institutions. For example, due to the intervention of an international organization, countries could have incentives to dismantle institutions that build up reversal cost and/or do not fully build their fiscal capacity.