in the world in a few decades. Now China is returning to its historical past. To understand China’s development, and to …China was the largest economy in the world before the end of the 19th century; then became one of the poorest countries … understand where and how far China will move forward, this paper examines how its institution functioning. …

period 1550–1630. We add evidence from Japan and China from the early modern period until 1800 to obtain a human capital …

1950s. Finally, we turn to the determinants of a broad array of development indicators for the year 1960 and for the 1960 …

distributed unequally and institutions do not ensure political commitments. The results imply that for any level of development … resources for which democracy is infeasible in equilibrium irrespective of the level of development. The model also delivers …

of development. We document the following regularities. First, as countries develop, their productive structure moves … from more volatile to less volatile sectors. Second, the level of specialization declines with development at early stages …, and slowly increases at later stages of development. Third, the volatility of country- specific macroeconomic shocks falls …

To identify the effect of social capital on financial development, we exploit the well-known differences in social …