Can international migration promote better institutions at home by raising the demand for political accountability? In … order to examine this question, we designed a behavioral measure of the population’s desire for better governance. A … countries with better governance, especially return migrants. …

Motivated by a novel stylized fact -- countries with isolated capital cities display worse quality of governance -- we … ways: broader power sharing (associated with better governance) means that any rents have to be shared more broadly, hence … capital city allows the elite to appropriate a larger share of output, so the costs of better governance for the elite, in …

Most research on firm financing studies the choice between debt and equity. We model an alternative source -- non … issues equity if the financing need is high. This result is robust to using the cash for an uncertain investment. Second …

This paper aims to show that culture is an important determinant of the effectiveness of formal democratic institutions …, such as elections. We collect new data to document the presence of voluntary and social organizations and the history of … elections. These results support the view that social capital complements democratic institutions such as elections. …

We propose a general theory that explains the extent of the state and accounts for related institutions as byproducts …

-2000 period. Our main conclusion is that race, rather than political institutions and education policies, is the main force …