The aim of the paper is to investigate the role played by differences in Institutional Quality on the process of technology catch-up across countries. Empirical evidence shows how countries endowed with better institutions are those experiencing higher TFP growth rates, faster rates of...

History tells that institutions evolve gradually over time, pushing new ideas across borders and cultures. Globalisation is argued to accelerate this process. We examine the spatial links of different political institutions across borders. Applying various tests for spatial proximity, we do not...

The objective of this paper is to examine whether informal labor markets affect the flows of Foreign Direct Investment (FDI), and also whether this effect is similar in developed and developing countries. With this aim, different public data sources, such as the World Bank (WB), and the United...

Drawing on a database for 1988-2006 containing information on 157 countries, we investigate the effects on military spending of government form, electoral rules, concentration of parliamentary parties, and ideology. From an OLS regression on pooled data, our results show that presidential...