I construct a theory of foreign interventions in which the political preferences of the foreign country are determined by its different economic ties with alternative local groups.  Stronger economic ties make a group more influenceable from the outside, and thus more willing to grant economic...

Party activists wish to (i) advocate the best policy and yet (ii) unify behind a common party line. An activist`s understanding of his environment is based on the speeches of party leaders. A leader`s influence, measured by the weight placed on her speech, increases with her judgement on policy...

Party activists face a coordination problem: a critical mass (a barrier to coordination) must advocate a single policy alternative if the party is to succeed. The need for direction is the degree to which the merits of the alternatives respond to the underlying mood of the party. An individual`s...

An influential thesis [Kuran, 2011, The Long Divergence] locates the economic failure of the Middle East in Islamic legal arrangements that laid the basis for organizational deficiencies.  This article critically scrutinizes this thesis using the lens of political economy and argues that...

I construct a trade model of empire, and use it to interpret some of the key patterns in the history of European imperialism.  I begin from the observation that trade was a key source of wealth for the colonies, and trade restrictions a key tool of extraction for colonial powers.  But the...

The causes of the USA's exceptional economic performance are investigated by comparing American wages and prices with wages and prices in Great Britain, Egypt, and India.  Habakkuk's views on the causes of American industrial pre-eminence are reassessed.  While the USA had abundant natural...

This paper uses data on judicial citations to explore whether the diffusion and/or application of knowledge within an organisation is affected by worker connectivity. Developing a simple model of discretionary citations, we distinguish between two hypotheses: knowledge diffusion whereby...

This paper investigates the behaviour of bodies or organizations, operating in a stochastic environment, where there is a delegated decision maker.  A crucial decision is when to delegate to another decision maker.  The problem may be intrapersonal, as occurs when there are endogenously...

We theoretically and empirically examine the relationship between natural resource revenues and financial development.  In the theoretical part, we present a politico-economic model in which contract enforcement is low and decreasing in resource revenues when political institutions are poor,...

This paper argues that rural opposition to land reform in transition Russia is a consequence of individually rational decisions by members of former state and collective farms about whether to support further land reform, or preserve the status quo, collective farming. Evidence from survey data...