This paper deals with fluctuations over time in the extent of the state-owned firm sector? nationalization-privatization cycles (NPCs). Anecdotal observations of NPCs are supported threefold by systematic empirical evidence: first, for different regions and economic systems, second, for...

We consider the empirical relevance of two opposing hypotheses on the causality between income and democracy: The Democratic Transition claims that rising incomes cause a transi¬tion to democracy, whereas the Critical Junctures hypothesis denies this causal relation. Our empirical strategy is...

The paper considers the transformation of the political system as countries pass through the Grand Transition from a poor developing country to a wealthy developed country. In the process most countries change from an authoritarian to a democratic political system. This is shown by using the...

Measures of corruption and income are highly correlated across countries. We use prehistoric measures of biogeography as instruments for modern income levels to identify an exogenous long-run income effect. We find that our corruption-free incomes explain the cross-country pattern of corruption...

The Grand Transition (GT) view claims that economic development is causal to institutional development, and that many institutional changes can be understood as transitions occurring at roughly the same level (zones) of development. The Primacy of Institutions (PoI) view claims that economic...

The complexity of credit money is seen as the central issue in the banking-macro nexus, which the author considers as a structural as well as a process component of the evolving economy. This nexus is significant for the stability/fragility of the economic system because it links the monetary...

Some path-breaking work on mergers takes efficiency gains for granted, or assumes that firms have perfect knowledge when taking merger decisions. In practice, firms and competition authorities cannot know exact future efficiency gains, prior to merger consummation. This paper analyzes horizontal...

Antitrust issues increasingly reach beyond national borders. This paper addresses the question whether such issues can reasonably be solved by an extraterritorial application of national competition law or whether they call for an international competition policy of its own. The analysis is...

Hybrid governance structures between markets and hierarchies in many industries, e.g., in energy and telecommunications, challenge antitrust and regulation policy. The paper focuses on the theoretical and methodological basis provided by the New Institutional Economics (NIE) for analyzing the...