Recent research shows that political centralization can reduce elite capture and improve governance outcomes. Despite these benefits, we demonstrate that there is a limit for an independent-minded, centralized bureaucracy to eliminate the influence of private and local interests. We study a...

This paper assesses the attitude of investors towards Democratic change by performing an event study using Russian government bonds. The Revolution of 1905 offers an ideal occasion as, alongside the related revolutionary events, it was accompanied by two opposing constitutional changes within a...

We perform various experiments correlating past changes of social indicators about a country with future stock market returns for that country. The 169 social indicators we use, which go back as far as the year 1900, are available from the Varieties of Democracy Project. We use two sets of data...

This paper assesses the effect of political institutions on stock market performance in 14 African countries for which stock market data is available for the period 1990-2010. The estimation technique used is a Two-Stage-Least Squares Instrumental Variable methodology. Political regime channels...