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. …

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. …

-specific pre-colonial institutions in shaping comparative regional development in Africa. We utilize information on the spatial … different country-level institutions, offers a regression discontinuity framework. After identifying the partitioned ethnicities … we document a positive cross-sectional association between national institutions and regional economic development …

We investigate the role of national institutions on regional development in a novel framework. We exploit the fact that … institutions. Using both a matching-type and a regression discontinuity approach we show that differences in countrywide … correlation between formal national institutions and economic development has to be carefully interpreted. …

We investigate the role of deeply-rooted pre-colonial ethnic institutions in shaping comparative regional development … ethnic homelands with different legacies of pre-colonial political institutions. …