Showing 1 - 10 of 22
countries, communities on both sides of the long-gone Habsburg border have been sharing common formal institutions for a century …
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10008873335
We model the effect of Protestant vs. Catholic denomination in an economic theory of suicide, accounting for differences in religious-community integration, views about man’s impact on God’s grace, and the possibility of confessing sins. We test the theory using a unique micro-regional...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10009147410
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. …
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10011084066
We revisit one of the central empirical findings of the political economy literature that higher income per capita causes democracy. Existing studies establish a strong cross-country correlation between income and democracy, but do not typically control for factors that simultaneously affect...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005666490
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 …
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005667122
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. …
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005791566
We consider a model of policy choice in which appropriate policies depend on a country’s own circumstances, but the presence of a successful leader generates an informational externality and results in too little ‘policy experimentation’. Corrupt governments are reined in while honest...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005136734
enabled these groups to demand, obtain and sustain changes in institutions to protect their property rights. Furthermore, the … existing institutions placed some checks on the monarchy and particularly limited its control of overseas trading activities … the result of capitalist development driven by the interaction of late medieval institutions and the economic …
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005067437
This paper revisits and critically re-evaluates the widely-accepted modernization hypothesis which claims that per capita income causes the creation and the consolidation of democracy. We argue that existing studies find support for this hypothesis because they fail to control for the presence...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005661513
policies were chosen in Botswana because good institutions, which we refer to as institutions of private property, were in … place. Why did institutions of private property arise in Botswana, but not other African nations? We conjecture that the … following factors were important. First, Botswana possessed relatively inclusive pre-colonial institutions, placing constraints …
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005661844