The most important event in human economic history before the Industrial Revolution was the Neolithic transition from a nomadic hunter-gatherer lifestyle to sedentary agriculture, beginning about 10,000 years ago. The transition made possible the human population explosion, the rise of...

The purpose of this paper is to explore the effects of island status and country size on institutional quality, and to determine if these institutional effects can explain the relatively strong economic performance of islands and small countries. One of the main findings of this paper is that...

The three “spheres” of society (governments, markets, and communities) are widely acknowledged yet the overall organization is analyzed only rarely, and interactions between the spheres have perhaps never been modeled. Fiske’s four relational models (community-sharing, authority-ranking,...

This paper argues that the number of deaths in a conflict can be a measure of duration and demonstrates that there are information gains to this approach. The well-known conflict database of International Peace Research Institute is compared with the database of Center for Systemic Peace which...

In recent years, empirical investigations have shown that various aspects of physical geography are closely related to the quality of a country’s economic institutions. For instance, distance from the equator in latitude degrees is positively correlated to both institutional quality and to...

The literature on nation-building and nationalism suggests that nation-building affects economic and political performance, mitigates the problems associated with ethnic hetero- geneity, but that nationalism, an indicator of successful nation-building, is linked to dismal performance via...

In this comment on AJR (2001), we argue that a bundling of all former colonies into one ‘colonial’ theory of comparative development is problematic for several reasons. During the mercantilist wave of mainly Latin American colonization between 1500-1830, strong capitalist institutions were...

In this study, a number of factors have been considered as potential determinants of institutional quality in Sub- Saharan African countries. The empirical analysis has shown that historical factors such as state legitimacy determine the quality of current institutions in the region. Foreign aid...

In the growing literature on the creation of institutions, the theories emphasizing colonial and legal origin, religious affiliation, Western European influence, and settler mortality, have been especially influential. The influence of these studies rests heavily on empirical modeling, which,...

The level of ethnic diversity is believed to have significant consequences for economic and political development within countries. In this article, we provide a theoretical and empirical analysis of the determinants of ethnic diversity in the world. We introduce a model of cultural and ge-...