The French Revolution of 1789 had a momentous impact on neighboring countries. The French Revolutionary armies during the 1790s and later under Napoleon invaded and controlled large parts of Europe. Together with invasion came various radical institutional changes. French invasion removed the...

Recent work emphasizes the primacy of differences in countries' colonially-bequeathed property rights and legal systems for explaining differences in their subsequent economic development. Barbados and Jamaica provide a striking counter example to this long-run view of income determination. Both...

This paper empirically investigates the performance of Chinese initial public offerings (IPOs). The data used covers the period from mid-1995 to mid-1999 with the sample including 884 companies (both in the A- and B-share markets). In an examination of growth, profitability and stability of...

Explanations of economic growth and prosperity commonly identify a unique causal effect, e.g., institutions, culture, human capital, geography. In this paper we provide instead a theoretical modeling of the interaction between culture and institutions and their effects on economic activity. We...

Critical transitions for a country are historical periods when the powerful organizations in a country shift from one set of beliefs about how institutions (the formal and informal rules of the game) will affect outcomes to a new set of beliefs. Critical transitions can lead a country toward...

What factors affect the diffusion of new economic institutions? This paper examines this question by exploiting the introduction of the first regularized patent system, which appeared in the Venetian Republic in 1474. We begin by developing a model that links patenting activity of craft guilds...

We document a sequence of institutional innovations associated with the corporate form over the course of several centuries in Toulouse. Shareholding companies that began in the 11th century formally incorporated themselves into two large-scale, widely held firms by 1373. In the years that...

This paper introduces endogenous property rights into a neoclassical growth model. 1t identifies a mechanism that generates growth rates which are increasing at low levels of capital. and decreasing at high levels of capital. The driving force behind changes in property rights is the attempt of...

We provide an analytical narrative of the political and economic causes and consequences of institutional changes in the Argentine banking system. We devote most of our attention to the privatization of the provincial banks. Our story differs from the prevailing wisdom in its stress on the key...

The focus of policy reform in developing countries has moved from getting prices right to getting institutions right, and accordingly countries are increasingly being advised to move towards quot;best-practicequot; institutions. This paper argues that appropriate institutions for developing...