It is now well established that highly developed countries tend to score well on measures of social capital and have higher levels of generalized trust. In turn, the willingness to trust has been shown to be correlated with various social and environmental factors (e.g. institutions, culture) on...

We study the impact on visa restrictions of institutions and social norms in a sending country. To this purpose, we unbundle institutions into “institutions-services”, which complement productive activities and serve as public production inputs, and “institutions-rules”, which strengthen...

Institutions affect investment decisions, including investments in human capital. Hence institutions are relevant for the allocation of talent. Good market-supporting institutions attract talent to productive value-creating activities, whereas poor ones raise the appeal of rent-seeking. We...

We provide a theory and empirical evidence showing that the rotation of ruling elites in combination with elites' asset ownership could improve property rights protection, and that such association holds for non-democratic political regimes when it is based on elites' concerns about security of...

Private ownership confers numerous benefits, including stronger performance incentives, better use of privately owned assets, and improved access to finance. We argue that privately owned land could be both an asset and a liability, and overall net benefits of land ownership are contingent on...

Does less inequality in wealth distribution imply better property rights protection? In this paper we show that this impact is non monotonous and is conditional on a) equilibrium type: conflict (rent-seeking) or peace, b) the reasons of changes in wealth distribution, and c) the size of the...

Cluster policy is recognized as one of the pivotal elements of state-of-art innovation policy. State support for clusters helps to take into account regional peculiarities and engage the most innovative local actors into the process of innovation policy drafting and implementation. Cluster...

Recent decades have been years of intensive growth, structural change and expanding informality for many developing and emerging economies. However, in exploring the relationship between structural change and productivity growth, most empirical studies ignored informality. This paper explores...

In this paper we explore relationships between corruption perceptions and such characteristics as the size of shadow economy, GDP per capita, well-being, the Happy Planet Index (HPI), and quality of institutions. Special attention is paid to the comparison of transitional economies with...

One of the attributes most consistently highlighted in the literature on frontier society is the tendency to spontaneous social organisation. However, despite the resilience of the ‘frontier thesis' within sociology and political science, it has not been subject to a rigorous empirical...