In this essay I review the new book by Torsten Persson and Guido Tabellini, The Economic Effects of Constitutions, which investigates the policy and economic consequences of different forms of government and electoral rules. I also take advantage of this opportunity to discuss the advantages and...

In this paper we revisit the relationship between institutions, human capital and development. We argue that empirical models that treat institutions and human capital as exogenous are misspecified both because of the usual omitted variable bias problems and because of differential measurement...

Thomas Piketty's (2013) book, <em>Capital in the 21st Century</em>, follows in the tradition of the great classical economists, like Marx and Ricardo, in formulating general laws of capitalism to diagnose and predict the dynamics of inequality. We argue that general economic laws are unhelpful as a guide...

Following on Keynes's Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren, this paper develops conjectures about the world we will leave to our grandchildren. It starts by outlining the 10 most important trends that have defined our economic, social, and political lives over the last 100 years. It then...

In this article, we revisit the relationship among institutions, human capital, and development. We argue that empirical models that treat institutions and human capital as exogenous are misspecified, both because of the usual omitted variable bias problems and because of differential...

A notable feature of post-World War II civil wars is their very long average duration. We provide a theory of the persistence of civil wars. The civilian government can successfully defeat rebellious factions only by creating a relatively strong army. In weakly-institutionalized polities this...

The majority of labor transactions throughout much of history and a significant fraction of such transactions in many developing countries today are "coercive", in the sense that force or the threat of force plays a central role in convincing workers to accept employment or its terms. We propose...

We study the evolution of the social norm of "cooperation" in a dynamic environment. Each agent lives for two periods and interacts with agents from the previous and next generations via a coordination game. Social norms emerge as patterns of behavior that are stable in part due to agents'...

In this paper we revisit the relationship between institutions, human capital and development. We argue that empirical models that treat institutions and human capital as exogenous are misspecified both because of the usual omitted variable bias problems and because of differential measurement...

In this paper we revisit the relationship between democracy, redistribution and inequality. We first explain the theoretical reasons why democracy is expected to increase redistribution and reduce inequality, and why this expectation may fail to be realized when democracy is captured by the...