During the 1930s, rating agencies took up a central role in regulatory supervision that they still have today. We study the process through which they received this regulatory license. The proximate cause for this changeover was the economic shock of the Great Depression. Exploring the...

Over the last two centuries, many countries experienced regime transitions toward democracy. We document this democratic transition over a long time horizon. We use historical time series of income, education and democracy levels from 1870 to 2000 to explore the economic factors associated with...

We present a general model of the interaction between settlement and the emergence of de facto property rights on frontiers prior to governments establishing and enforcing de jure property rights. Settlers have an incentive to establish de facto property rights to avoid the dissipation...

Using a newly assembled dataset spanning from 1820 to 1998, we study the relationship between the occurrence and magnitude of episodes of mass killing and the levels of development and democracy across countries and over time. Mass killings appear to be more likely at intermediate levels of...

Does faster economic growth increase pressure for democratic change, or reduce it? Using data for 154 countries for the period 1963-2007, we examine the short-run relationship between economic growth and moves toward and away from greater democracy. To address the potential endogeneity of...

This paper provides an explanation for why political leaders may want to adopt ideological positions and maintain them over time even in the face of conflicting evidence. We study a dynamic framework in which politicians are better informed than the voting public about an underlying state of...

There is controversy about whether geography matters mainly because of its contemporaneous impact on economic outcomes or because of its interaction with historical events. Looking at terrain ruggedness, we are able to estimate the importance of these two channels. Because rugged terrain hinders...

We initiate examination of the political boundaries of the firm by exploring the phenomenon of ‘businessman candidates’: business owners and managers who bypass conventional means of political influence to run for public office themselves. We argue that in-house production of political...

We develop a theory of interstate conflict in which the degree of genealogical relatedness between populations has a positive effect on their conflict propensities because more closely related populations, on average, tend to interact more and develop more disputes over sets of common issues. We...

Several countries have recently abolished or significantly reduced their taxes on bequests. Bequest taxes, on the other hand, were among the first to be introduced when modern systems of taxation were developed at the end of the nineteenth century. We propose an explanation for these facts which...