Economists generally assume that the state has sufffcient institutional capacityto support markets and levy taxes, assumptions which cannot be taken forgranted in many states, neither historcally nor in today’s developing world.Our paper develops a framework where "policy choices" in market...

The absence of state capacities to raise revenue and to supportmarkets is a key factor in explaining the persistence of weak states.This paper reports on an on-going project to investigate the incentiveto invest in such capacities. The paper sets out a simple analyticalstructure in which state...

This paper develops a simple model to analyze how a lack of politi-cal competition may lead to policies that hinder economic growth. Wetest the predictions of the model on panel data for the US states. Inthese data, we …nd robust evidence that lack of political competitionin a state is...