This paper examines the relationship between political competition and financial development across a global sample of 127 countries, with a particular focus on developed and democratic OECD countries. Building on the theoretical frameworks of Acemoglu and Robinson (2006) and Besley et al....

The literature shows that when a society believes that wealth is determined by random "luck" rather than by merit, it demands more redistribution. Adverse shocks, like earthquakes, strengthen the belief that random "bad luck" can frustrate the outcomes achieved with merit. We theoretically...

How deep are the roots of Latin America's economic inequalities? In this chapter we survey both the history and the literature about the region's extreme economic disparities, focusing on the most recent academic contributions. We begin by documenting the broad patterns of national and...

This short paper studies the empirical relationship between realized stock returns and bond yields at the 5- and 10-year investment horizons, respectively. Using annual Danish data since 1927, we find that stock returns and bond yields are closely linked in the medium and long term, as we...