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 …

relatively stable democracy to autocracy and 6 episodes of small improvements in representative institutions. We also classify …. These results appear robust to controls like the social environment (religion and fractionalization), natural resources …, trade openness and proxies of early institutions. …

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. …