The Internet is great but broken. Back in the day, it brought us the Usenet Newsgroups, the Blogosphere and John Perry Barlow’s Declaration of Independence. Now, the Internet is dominated by monopolistic, addictive, asocial platforms that pit us against one another in a deluge of fake news,...

To what extent differences across developing countries in their domestic tax mobilization can be explained, in addition to the traditional determinants, by political economy factors and particularly by the political regime? Using a panel of 78 developing countries over the period 1990-2005, this...

This paper does three things. First, based on a limited number of theoretically established dimensions, it proposes a new de facto indicator for the rule of law. It is the first such indicator to take the quality of legal norms explicitly into account. Second, using this indicator we shed new...

This paper analyzes the utilization of repression and democratic institutions by a non-democratic government striving for political power and private rents. We find that economic development has different impacts on policy choices, depending on whether it appears in the form of rises in income...

We present a simple model that illustrates how democracy may improve the quality of economic institutions. The model further suggests that institutional quality varies more across autocracies than across democracy and that the positive effect of democracy on institutional quality is increasing...

This paper presents theoretical and empirical evidence on the nexus between corruption and democracy. We establish a political economy model where the effect of democracy on corruption is conditional on income distribution and property rights protection. Our empirical analysis with...

We present a simple model, illustrating how democracy may improve the quality of the economic institutions. The model further suggests that institutional quality varies more across autocracies than across democracy and that the positive effect of democracies on economic institutional quality...

Despite some indications to the contrary, religion still plays an important role in contemporary society. In this paper, the association between religion and the quality of public goods and services, measured by the so-called “delivery quality” index of the Worldwide Governance Indicators...

Does democracy increase economic growth? Previous literature tends to find a positive effect but does also suffer from possible endogeneity problems: democratization is typically not random and might be affected by factors that also have an impact on economic growth. This paper narrows down the...

We present a novel approach for measuring democracy, which enables a very detailed and sensitive index. This method is based on Support Vector Machines, a mathematical algorithm for pattern recognition. Our implementation evaluates 188 countries in the period between 1981 and 2011. The Support...