Using SIPRI data on all international transfers of major conventional weapons 1950–2007, we study the relationship between differences in polity and arms trade. To study whether states tend to trade arms within their political vicinity we estimate gravity models of the likelihood of trade at...

The last decade witnessed a wide expansion of Islamic finance in Middle Eastern and Southeast Asian countries. Sukuk issues, which are Islamic financial instruments structured to replicate the cash flows of conventional bonds, have notably proliferated, fuelling the debate on the similarity...

Do democratization and globalization processes combine to increase the incidence of violence in developing and emerging economies? The present paper examines this hypothesis by a study of internal violence in Sub-Sahara Africa with its recent democratization wave, the globalization process and...

We introduce reported job satisfaction as a measure of economic performance and find it positively correlated with GDP per capita and the labor force participation rate in a sample of OECD countries and negatively correlated with unemployment. Moreover, we find that many measures of corporatism,...

We link a model of inequality and redistribution where multiple steady states can emerge, to the recent literature on beliefs, and argue that changes in beliefs may shift the equilibrium over time. We present evidence that beliefs are typically very stable over time, yet argue that Brazil has...

A large body of qualitative studies on the positive role played by big businesses in promoting economic growth is widely available. However, any rigorous attempt to measure this impact has yet to be made. In this paper, we attempt to fill this gap by utilizing new and internationally comparable...

We find a robust relationship between motor vehicle ownership, its interaction with legal heritage and obesity in OECD countries. Our estimates indicate that an increase of 100 motor vehicles per thousand residents is associated with about a 6% point increase in obesity in common law countries,...

This paper proposes a new instrument for institutional quality which varies across countries with historically low rates of European settlement. Using a new data set which exploits differences in the quality of colonial administration, it finds evidence that colonies with better paid colonial...

What are the long-term effects of Communism on economically relevant notions such as social trust, fairness, and scope of cooperation? To answer this question, we study the post-unification trajectory of convergence between East and West German individuals with regard to trust, cooperation, and...

The existing studies on vertical integration focus on factors at the transaction parties’ level, such as asset specificity and contractual incompleteness. What is overlooked is the quality of the underlying institutions, in particular, contracting institutions. In this paper, using a World...