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 …

relatively stable democracy to autocracy and 6 episodes of small improvements in representative institutions. We also classify …We identify permanent democratic transitions during the Third Wave of Democratization and the nineties, when many … prerequisites for democracy in these countries that enter the Third Wave as non-democracies. Examining initially autocratic …

unrest or revolution, and this may force the elite to democratize. Democracy may not consolidate because it is more … redistributive than a nondemocratic regime, and this gives the elite an incentive to mount a coup. Because inequality makes democracy … more costly for the elite, highly unequal societies are less likely to consolidate democracy and may end up oscillating …

evaluate separately the impact of political institutions linked to democracy and suffrage and of those institutions more … a major role in the determination of this historical event, but that the quality of institutions also mattered. We … find that both sets of institutions contributed to this event, even after controlling for their potential endogeneity …

notably, that evolved institutions are inherently superior to those 'designed'; that institutions must be 'appropriate' and … cannot be 'transplanted'; and that the civil code and other French institutions have adverse economic effects. …

democracy enhances entry rates for small sized firms but reduces them for medium or large ones. …

the elite in democracy or for costs of changing economic institutions, the equilibrium takes the form of a Markov regime … difficult than altering economic institutions, the model leads to a pattern of captured democracy, whereby a democratic regime …We construct a model of simultaneous change and persistence in institutions. The model consists of landowning elites …

of recent theories of democratization (Acemoglu and Robinson, 2000; Lizzeri and Persico, 2004). In addition, we show that …