Using data from the Indonesian Family Life Surveys, this paper studies the impact of fiscal decentralisation in Indonesia on local public spending across communities with different types of local institutions. Our results provide evidence of heterogeneity in access to public goods across...

The aspects of institutions’ influence on economic growth and the priorities of their development are studied in the article. Two complementary analytical techniques are suggested. The first one, based on the discrete institutional alternatives method, is aimed at the "institutional design"...

The concepts social innovation and social entrepreneurship have gained considerable attention both in different fields of academic research and in the context of the development of economic and social policies. However, despite its wide-spread use there does not exist a unique or at least widely...

Declining general trust has become a serious social issue in China in recent years. This paper attempts to understand and analyze this social phenomenon from a social interaction perspective. Based on a repeated prisoners´ dilemma game on networks, it finds that the evolution of general trust...

Since 1950s, most African nations have gained independence from their colonial powers. Fortunately, independence has brought many changes to these nations and these include multi-party democratic government and western education systems. Unfortunately, the Africa’s economy is the least...

Drawing from the literature on the determinants of corruption, this article examines the relationship between corruption and the nature of state of fragility. Robust empirical evidence shows a correlation between the level of corruption and state fragility. In a further assessment with the...

This paper uses a unique dataset to investigate the effect of the cognitive ability of leading politicians on state capacity. Given the evidence that cognitive ability of leading politicians’ affects state capacity positively, except Africa. For the continent, this relationship between state...

We propose a general theory that explains the extent of the state and accounts for related institutions as byproducts of the state's extractive technology. We posit further that this extractive technology is determined by the transparency of the production technology. This theory is applied to...

In randomized control laboratory experiments, we find that those primed to think about markets exhibit more trusting behavior. We randomly and unconsciously prime experimental participants to think about markets and trade. We then ask them to play a trust game involving an anonymous stranger. We...

In this paper, we provide a new framework for analyzing corruption in public bureaucracies. The standard way to model corruption is as an example of moral hazard, which then leads to a focus on better monitoring and stricter penalties with the eradication of corruption as the final goal. We...