countries, communities on both sides of the long-gone Habsburg border have been sharing common formal institutions for a century …

The interplay between religion and the economy has occupied social scientists for long. We construct a unique panel of … doubt on causal interpretations of the religion- economy nexus in Prussian secularization. …

A long tradition in economics explores the association between the quality of formal institutions and economic … performance. The literature on the relationship between such institutions and happiness is, however, rather limited. In this paper …, we revisit the findings from recent cross-country studies on the institutions-happiness association. Our findings suggest …

We estimate the respective contributions of institutions, geography, and trade in determining income levels around the … world, using recently developed instruments for institutions and trade. Our results indicate that the quality of … institutions 'trumps' everything else. Once institutions are controlled for, measures of geography have at best weak direct effects …

This paper opens with a discussion of the types of institutions that allow markets to perform adequately. While we can … identify in broad terms what these are, there is no unique mapping between markets and the non-market institutions that … institutions. A range of evidence indicates that participatory democracies enable higher-quality growth. …