Marriage and divorce decisions are influenced by the institutional environment they are made in. One example is the social insurance system, which acts as a substitute for within-household insurance against economic shocks. In this paper, we quantify the importance of household-level insurance...

One of the core indicators in the field of scientometrics is the number of papers published by a unit within a given period. However, such indicators can only be assessed properly by considering the unit's available resources. When evaluating the efficiency of institutions worldwide, the problem...

The offshoring of production by multinational firms has expanded dramatically in recent decades, increasing these firms’ potential for economic growth and technological transfers across countries. What determines the location of offshore production? How do countries' policies and...

We develop a simple structural model of value added tax (VAT) compliance, and estimate it using widely available national accounts data to learn about compliance in countries where little is currently known. International border controls improve VAT compliance, generating a correlation between...

We develop a model where firms profit from coercing workers into employment under conditions violating national law and international conventions and where bureaucrats benefit from accepting bribes from detected perpetrators. Firms and bureaucrats are heterogeneous. Employers differ in their...

This paper assesses the relationship between institutions, output, and productivity, when official output is corrected for the size of the shadow economy. Our results confirm the usual positive impact of institutional quality on official output and total factor productivity, and its negative...

Technological progress and trade potentially affect wages and employment. Technological progress can make jobs obsolete and trade can increase unemployment in import competing sectors. Empirical evidence suggests that both causes are important to explain recent labour market developments in many...

We use archetypoid analysis as a new tool to categorize institutions and faculties of economics. The approach identifies typical characteristics of extreme (archetypal) values in a multivariate data set. Each entity under investigation is assigned relative shares of the identified archetypoid,...

We study the implications of two historical institutions, direct British rule, and the heterogeneous land tenure institutions implemented by the British, on disparity in present day development using district level data from India. Using nightlights per capita as a proxy for district level per...

In this paper we study how differences in the quality of countries’ institutions affect the impact of natural hazards in these countries. To do so, we first build a new data set that allows us to adequately control for countries’ development and geological characteristics and,...