We use the largest common factor in 14 items reported in the World Values Surveys as a robust measure of religiosity. This measure is held to identify the importance of religion in all aspects of people's life. The level of religiosity differs by about 50 percentage points between rich and poor...

The agricultural transition, the demographic transition and the democratic transition explain the development paths of the share of agriculture, the population growth rate, and the standard democracy indices. We demonstrate that two related estimation models give contradictory results when...

The World Values Survey contains an item on ownership, which is polled 200 times in 92 countries at the four waves of 1990, 1995, 2000 and 2005. It is developed into the CS-score that measures the aggregate mass support for capitalism and socialism. Four hypotheses are advanced and tested to...

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...