Why do some societies fail to adopt more efficient political and economic institutions in response to changing economic conditions? And why do such conditions sometimes generate conservative ideological backlashes and, at other times, progressive social and political movements? We propose an...

There is a consensus among scholars that institutions (i.e. norms and regulations) are country specific. The paper aims to contribute to the debate by examining the type of institutions which have been the most important for growth in transition countries. It employs a new set of the...

Chang (2011) raises doubts about the effects of institutions on economic development and questions the positive effects of entirely free markets based on secure private property rights. We respond by stressing that institutions structure the incentives underlying individual action, secure...

Chang (2011) raises doubts about the effects of institutions on economic development and questions the positive effects of entirely free markets based on secure private property rights. We respond by stressing that institutions structure the incentives underlying individual action, secure...

The 19th century legal historian Henry Maine famously defined progress, and by extension, liberal modernity, as the substitution of relations based on status (especially family and title), to relations based on contract, especially trade and employment. The article suggests that Maine's...

We propose an Institutional Presence (IP) measure to capture the latent role of non-owner institutional investors who nevertheless may be observing a firm. We employ this measure to examine whether the ‘presence' of institutional investors reduces information asymmetry in the market. Firms in...

We revisit the debate over whether political institutions cause economic growth, or whether, alternatively, growth and human capital accumulation lead to institutional improvement. We find that most indicators of institutional quality used to establish the proposition that institutions cause...