Institutional bottlenecks refer to path-dependent institutional arrangements which contribute to economic stagnation. In his research, Timur Kuran identifies several historical institutional bottlenecks which contributed to economic decline and underdevelopment of the Middle East. We use Kuran's...

A country's political and economic institutions are critical for economic prosperity. The literature abounds with institutional measures, precisely because institutions are not one dimensional. We use panel-unit-root and cointegration tests to examine the time-series properties of several...

Investigations of national competitiveness aim to trace the causal mechanisms behind patterns in wealth and poverty across societies. This paper argues that to be productive such investigations must be comparative, historical and political economic in nature. Comparative historical political...

What factors and processes influence the wealth of nations? This is the central question addressed by North, Wallis, and Weingast (NWW) (2009) in their framework for quot;interpreting recorded human history.quot; This essay emphasizes that the implications of NWW's analysis provide the...

Reconstruction involves military occupation with the aim of rebuilding and reforming both formal and informal institutions along liberal democratic lines. We contend that successful reconstructions require mechanisms which make reforms credible over the long-run. In the absence of a signal of...

While markets are all around us, not all markets are the same. Markets come in a variety of colors based on the legality of activities in the specific market. As such, there is no market economy per se, but instead various shades of markets. The different shades of markets that are evidenced in...

The current approach to the war on terror is largely ineffective. Central to this approach are negative sanctions against actual and potential terrorists coupled with attempts to spread liberal democracy through war, occupation, and reconstruction. We argue that negative sanctions are...

A country's political and economic institutions are critical for economic prosperity. The literature abounds with institutional measures, precisely because institutions are multi dimensional. We use panel-unit-root and cointegration tests to examine the time-series properties of several...