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 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....

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...

This paper develops a political economy framework to explain the underlying financial mechanisms through which redistributive policies may affect both the relative level of per capita income growth rates, and the relative stability of growth paths across countries. It proposes that...

We argue that the partition of ethnic groups following the Scramble for Africa does not itself matter for development in Africa. It matters only when the partitioned groups are relatively small because small groups lack political representation which may promote ethnic mobilization and foster...

This study examined the relationship between foreign aid and economic development in Sub Saharan Africa. The study seeks to examine the role of institutions in aid effectiveness in SSA countries by adopting a theoretical framework similar to the Endogenous/New Growth model and the System...

A large literature suggests that European settlement outside of Europe shaped institutional, educational, technological, cultural, and economic outcomes. This literature has had a serious gap: no direct measure of colonial European settlement. In this paper, we (1) construct a new database on...