We examine the use of proxies, shell companies, and offshore firms to defend property against seizure by private and state actors. Our theoretical framework emphasizes the role of political connections in defensive ownership. Linking information from investigative journalists on the key holdings...

I present a theory of political property rights that serves as a complement to familiar Tiebout mechanisms in explaining governance outcomes. I argue that when the structure of political property rights is such that the polity most closely resembles a business corporation, governance will be...

Taxation is only sustainable if the general public complies with it. The theoretical public finance literature has interpreted tax constitutions as binding contracts by which the power to tax is irretrievably conferred by individuals to government, which can then levy any tax it chooses....

This paper develops the empirical and theoretical case that differences in economic institutions are the fundamental cause of differences in economic development. We first document the empirical importance of institutions by focusing on two “quasi-natural experiments” in history, the...

Successful governance implies that organizations, networks, or practices create public or club goods by constraining behavior, sharing information, or providing resources. While effective governance may require a functional state, compelling studies have theorized informal governance without...

This paper is an attempt to contribute to the literature on the relationship between economic development and democratic institutions. The paper focuses on civil liberties and interprets them in a framework in which there is no dividing line drawn between “civil” and “property” rights....

The “efficient institutions view” on property rights claims that property rights emerged and are enforced when their enforcement maximizes net wealth. In a cross-country pattern this is usually understood as the prediction that economic development creates the incentives to provide higher...

According to the so-called Lipset hypothesis, economic development – a growing income and a growing level of education – creates the “social requisites” for democratic institutions. This proposition receives much support in the contemporary economic literature. This paper addresses a...

In the last two decades, a renewed interest in property rights have challenged the accepted interpretation of property rights as “bundle of rights” over the use of things and have rehabilitated the old classical interpretation of property rights as exclusive (absolute) dominium over things...