Understanding the consequences and recovery for countries hit by adverse national events such as political crises is central to understanding long-run development dynamics. Utilizing the Coleman boat framework, we develop a micro-foundation based theoretical framework grounded in public choice...

This paper explores whether coups cause increased crisis risk, and if some types of coups are associated with stronger risk. I use a worldwide sample with data on more than 1200 onsets of economic crisis between 1950 and 2019, treat separate effects of military and civilian coup attempts, and...

In this paper, I explore the politically contested association between the degree of capitalism, captured by measures of economic freedom, and the risk and characteristics of economic crisis. After offering some brief theoretical considerations, I estimate the effects of economic freedom on...

While previous research documents a negative relationship between government size and economic growth, suggesting an economic cost of big government, a given government size generally affects growth differently in different countries. As a possible explanation of this differential effect, we...

We explore the potential effects of the first leaders of Sub-Saharan Africa. We first outline a set of theoretical reasons for why leaders may matter particularly at the critical juncture of African independence and why this influence may be persistent. In an unbalanced panel from 40 African...

While the association between economic freedom and long-run economic growth is well documented, the parallel research literature on the distributional consequences of economic freedom is full of conflicting findings. In this paper, we take a step towards reconciling the two literatures by...

Coups and regime transitions are events that typically are intended to change the basic institutional framework of a country. Which specific policies change and the consequences of these changes nevertheless remains largely unknown. Change after a coup or transition implies that some form of...

Both institutional quality and institutional stability have been argued to stimulate economic growth. But to improve institutional quality, a country must endure a period of institutional change, which implies at least a little and possibly a lot of institutional instability. We investigate the...

Abstract: This paper seeks to estimate the economic growth effect of constitutional provisions for property rights protection. It does so using the unique situation in formerly communist countries in Central and Eastern Europe and the Caucasus where all but two introduced new constitutions after...

The World Values Survey contains an item on ownership, which is polled 200 times in 92 countries at the four waves of 1990, 1995, 2000 and 2005. It is developed into the CS-score that measures the aggregate mass support for capitalism and socialism. Four hypotheses are advanced and tested to...