This survey reviews the recent research on trust, institutions and economic development. It discusses the various … institutions and policies can affect trust and promote pro-social behaviors. … measures of trust and documents the substantial heterogeneity of trust across space and time. The conceptual mechanisms that …

This paper aims to show that culture is an important determinant of the effectiveness of formal democratic institutions … elections. These results support the view that social capital complements democratic institutions such as elections. …

We document that trust in public institutions--and particularly trust in banks, business and government--has declined … the most suffered the biggest loss in confidence in institutions, particularly in trust in government and the financial … over recent years. U.S. time series evidence suggests that this partly reflects the pro-cyclical nature of trust in …

localized and well-respected administration increased citizens’ trust in local public services. In several Eastern European … countries, communities on both sides of the long-gone Habsburg border have been sharing common formal institutions for a century … Habsburg affiliation increases current trust and reduces corruption in courts and police. Falsification tests of spuriously …

Institutions that serve the interests of an elite are often cited as an important reason for poor economic performance …. This paper builds a model of institutions that allocate resources and power to maximize the payoff of an elite, but where … any group that exerts sufficient fighting effort can launch a rebellion that destroys the existing institutions. The …

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 …

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 …

-faire ideology and blind faith in the invisible hand. With public-sector capital, this interplay of beliefs and institutions leads to …

This paper challenges cross-sectional findings that democratic institutions have a negligible direct effect on economic … institutions. We study democratization in a before-after event study approach that enables us to control for time-invariant country … representative institutions on economic activity. They also favour Friedrich Hayek (1960)’s idea that the merits of democracy appear …