This paper explores the mutual influence between the institutional development in Athens in the archaic and classical periods and the contemporary changes in economic life. This enhances our understanding of the causes and consequences of institutional change. It is also worth exploring in view...

We use the Economic Freedom Index (Gwartney, Lawson and Norton 2008) to characterise the institutions of ancient Athens in the fourth century BCE. It has been shown that ancient Greece witness improved living conditions for an extended period of time. Athens in the classical period appears to...

This paper proposes an original formal framework to analyze institutional evolution. Institutions have formal (F) and informal (N) aspects that may evolve at different paces, although eventually converging towards each other through an dynamic interactive process. N evolves with capital...

Both institutional quality and institutional stability have been argued to stimulate economic growth. But to improve institutional quality, a country must endure a period of institutional change, which implies at least a little and possibly a lot of institutional instability. We investigate the...

This study uses heterogeneous panel Granger causality tests to investigate the causal relationships between quality of governance and economic growth at the provincial level in China during the reform era. I find a significant and positive effect of economic growth on subsequent quality of...

Using historical data, we test the validity of Wagner's law of increasing state activity at different stages of economic development for five industrialized European countries: the United Kingdom, Denmark, Sweden, Finland and Italy. In order to investigate the coherence between Wagner's law and...

This research argues that variations in the interplay between cultural assimilation and cultural diffusion have played a significant role in giving rise to differential patterns of economic development across the globe. Societies that were geographically less vulnerable to cultural diffusion,...

We review developments in the history of money, banking, and financial intermediation over the last twenty years. We focus on studies of financial development, including the role of regulation and the history of central banking. We also review the literature of banking and financial crises. This...

The Impact of Microcredit on the Poor in Bangladesh: Revisiting the Evidence,' by David Roodman and Jonathan Morduch (2014) is the most recent of a sequence of papers and postings that seeks to refute the findings of the Pitt and Khandker (1998) article 'The Impact of Group-Based Credit on Poor...