This paper explores the idea that institutional details matter and that attempts to estimate the economic effects of federalism by employing a simple dummy variable neglect potentially important institutional details. Based on a principal component analysis, seven aspects of both federalism and...

Der Aufbauprozeß in den neuen Bundesländern kommt in letzter Zeit nur noch schleppend voran. Der Schwung, den die rasche Privatisierung der Betriebe und die massive finanzielle Unterstützung der Investitionstätigkeit ausgelöst haben, ist verlorengegangen. Die Hoffnungen auf einen...

Over the last several decades, both economists and political scientists have shown interest in coups d’état. Numerous studies have been dedicated to understanding the causes of coups. However, model uncertainty still looms large. About one hundred potential determinants of coups have been...

Over 10 years ago, Feld and Voigt (2003) introduced the first indicator for objectively meas-uring the actual independence of the judiciary and demonstrated its utility in a large cross-section of countries. The indicator has been widely used, but also criticized. This paper pre-sents more...

Understanding corruption is at the heart of treating the dysfunctionality of many countries’ public sectors. Yet, most corruption research suffers from one common problem: There is no “objective” measure of public-sector corruption for a cross-section of countries. Most studies on the...

This paper does three things. First, based on a limited number of theoretically established dimensions, it proposes a new de facto indicator for the rule of law. It is the first such indicator to take the quality of legal norms explicitly into account. Second, using this indicator we shed new...

This article introduces a novel database that measures governments' compliance with national constitutions. It combines information on de jure constitutional rules with data on their de facto implementation. The individual compliance indicators can be grouped into four categories that we...