Constitutional loyalty, the importance ascribed to complying with constitutional rules, is difficult to measure across countries due to differences in context, history, and culture. We overcome this challenge by exploiting the COVID-19 pandemic as an ideal setting in which societies around the...

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...

Does the adoption of technological change depend on labor market institutions? The disparities in technology adoption across countries are enormous and are a major factor in explaining poverty. The returns to introducing new technology differ across countries since they depend not only on...

We analyze the effect of state visits by the Catholic pope on human rights in the host country to illustrate how a small theocracy like the Vatican can exert significant political influence in international politics. Our theoretical model of the strategic interaction between the Catholic Church...

We analyze the countervailing incentives that mid-level appellate judges face when deciding whether to remand a case back to the lower court. Although appellate courts' ability to remand cases can mitigate moral hazard problems, by restraining trial court judges, it may sometimes instead...

Personal freedom is highly valued by many and a central element of liberal political philosophy. Although personal freedom is frequently associated with electoral democracy, developments in countries such as Hungary, Poland, Turkey and Russia, where elected populist leaders with authoritarian...

This is the first global study of how institutionally entrenched gender discrimination affects the gender migration gap (GMG) using data on 158 origin and 37 destination countries over the period 1961-2019. We estimate a gravity equation derived from a random utility maximization model of...

Spontaneous norms, or simply norms, can be defined as rules of conduct that emerge without intentional design and in the absence of purposeful external coordination. While the law and economics scholarship has formally analyzed spontaneous norms, the analysis has typically been limited to...

While research in constitutional economics has made important progress in recent decades, the factors determining whether a constitution is complied with have only received scant attention. We contribute to that narrow literature by studying how personal traits of political leaders are...

Federalism is a constitutionalized version of multi-tier governance. Proponents of veto-player theory argue that a high number of veto players leads to a high degree of policy stability. Compared to states with a unitary structure, federal countries, in which at least one sub-central level of...