This paper attempts to reconcile two models for sustainable economic growth in developing countries. I develop an empirical and theoretical case for how the geographic landscape of a country determines the ease with which it can assimilate foreign technologies and establish institutions...

This paper proposes and empirically validates four theories of why legal origin influences growth and welfare through finance. It is a natural extension of “Law and finance: why does legal origin matter?” by Thorsten Beck, Asli Demirgüç-Kunt and Ross Levine (2003). We find only partial...

This paper assesses how legal-origin influences financial development through regulation quality and the rule of law. It uses data collected after pioneering works on the law-finance nexus to assess hypotheses resulting there-from in the context of Africa. Distinctions are made between English,...

This paper cuts adrift the mainstream approach to the legal-origins debate on the law-growth nexus by integrating both overall economic and human components in our understanding of how regulation quality and the rule of law lie at the heart of economic and inequality adjusted human developments....

The paper examines how political institutions in comparison to legal, social and economic institutions fare with different measures of inequality in a cross section framework. The empirical analysis suggests that countries which practice democracy are less prone to unequal outcomes especially...

This paper first points out the lack of consensus between empirical and theoretical studies of income inequality and redistribution. While theoretical papers show that income inequality increases redistribution, empirical studies fail to confirm the same result. The paper later shows that even...

In spite of both theoretical and empirical contributions to investigate the determinants of redistribution, an important gap remains in the literature, which is the effect of efficiency of redistributive institutions on redistribution. This paper is an attempt to show that the state apparatus...

In this paper we contribute to the debate over the empirical relationship between trade openness and economic development. Unlike previous studies which treat trade openness and institutions as competitors in economic development, we find evidence that they are in fact complements. We also find...

This paper seeks to provide a systematized framework for the main ideas that have been developed by ECLAC concerning the effects that market-led reforms have had on labour, financial and technology markets. In order to explore these questions further, a research project has been undertaken by...

Imperial China used an empire-wide system of examinations to select civil servants. Using a semiparametric matching-based difference-in-differences estimator, we show that the persecution of scholar-officials led to a decline in the number of examinees at the provincial and prefectural level. To...