States and markets have sometimes been viewed as competitors, but in the last decade, there has been increasing agreement that a capable state can play an important facilitating role in the process of economic development. A number of studies have explored the empirical connection between...

In this paper, an index of the depth of experience with state-level institutions, or state antiquity, is derived for a large set of countries. We show that state antiquity is significantly correlated with measures of political stability and institutional quality, with income per capita, and with...