We provide evidence that democracy has a significant and robust positive effect on GDP. Our empirical strategy relies on a dichotomous measure of democracy coded from several sources to reduce measurement error and controls for country fixed effects and the rich dynamics of GDP, which otherwise...

In this paper we revisit the relationship between institutions, human capital and development. We argue that empirical models that treat institutions and human capital as exogenous are misspecified both because of the usual omitted variable bias problems and because of differential measurement...

Thomas Piketty's (2013) book, Capital in the 21st Century, follows in the tradition of the great classical economists, like Marx and Ricardo, in formulating general laws of capitalism to diagnose and predict the dynamics of inequality. We argue that general economic laws are unhelpful as a guide...

We provide a general framework for the analysis of the dynamics of institutional change (e.g., democratization, extension of political rights, or repression of different groups), and how these dynamics interact with (anticipated and unanticipated) changes in the distribution of political power...

The majority of labor transactions throughout much of history and a significant fraction of such transactions in many developing countries today are “coercive,” in the sense that force or the threat of force plays a central role in convincing workers to accept employment or its terms. We...

We provide an overview of recent research on belief and opinion dynamics in social networks. We discuss both Bayesian and non-Bayesian models of social learning and focus on the implications of the form of learning (e.g., Bayesian vs. non-Bayesian), the sources of information (e.g., observation...

We develop a model of information exchange through communication and investigate its implications for information aggregation in large societies. An underlying state determines payoffs from different actions. Agents decide which others to form a costly communication link with incurring the...

We study a stochastic gossip model of continuous opinion dynamics in a society consisting of two types of agents: regular agents, who update their beliefs according to information that they receive from their social neighbors; and stubborn agents, who never update their opinions and might...