Just as today’s observers struggle to justify the workings of the free market in the wake of a global economic crisis, an earlier generation of economists revisited their worldviews following the Great Depression. The Great Persuasion is an intellectual history of that project. Angus Burgin...

The aim of this paper is to determine which country-specific characteristics promote and which impede the adoption of institutions. On the basis of a broad panel of 183 countries for the period between 1996 and 2010, we test whether there are tendencies towards a general improvement and towards...