The article contributes to the growing literature on intermediate regiimes by presenting a model that incorporates key features of such regimes and generates several of the "stylized facts" that characterize their behavior: their political volatility, cross nationality and over time, and the...

In interpreting these results, we can make use of several characteristics of the economies of the developing nations. The first is that consumers in poor nations spend a very large portion of their incomes on food — in many cases, in excess of 50 to 60 percent. The second is that...

We analyze a game between citizens and governments, whose type (benevolent or predatory) is unknown to the public. Opportunistic governments mix between predation and restraint. As long as restraint is observed, political expectations improve, people enter the modern sector, and the economy...

We analyze a game between citizens and governments, whose type (benevolent or predatory) is unknown to the public. Opportunistic governments mix between predation and restraint. As long as restraint is observed, political expectations improve, people enter the modern sector, and the economy...

As poor policies are blamed for dismal economic outcomes in many African countries and institutions and governance have assumed greater importance in explaining policy making, this article overviews a set of papers appearing in the current volume on 'institutions, governance and economic...

In stateless societies, coercion is privately provided; violence is employed to engage in, and to defend against, predation. At best, violence results in mere redistribution; being destructive, it more often results in a loss of social welfare. When organized, however, violence can be socially...

In <em>Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History</em>, Douglass C. North, John Joseph Wallis, and Barry R. Weingast probe the organizational foundations of development. Outlining the properties of the "natural" and "open entry" societies, they highlight as...

The purpose of this paper include (a) a review of the literature on the so-called 'African dummy', (b) an explication of the system GMM method of estimation, by which Hoeffler(2002) shows the 'African dummy' to be an artifact of the application of inappropriate estimation techniques; and (c) an...