Many believe that multinational enterprises insensitively ignore political rights and civil liberties in the countries of their investments. Frequently, non-governmental organisations accuse multinationals of fostering repressive regimes in developing countries and consider foreign direct...

Pessimists on globalization claim that liberalization of markets allows multinational corporations free reign, constraining local autonomy and precipitating a race to the bottom that will endanger recent democratic gains. The optimists see the end of dirigiste economic models as favorable for...

The aim of this paper is to provide comprehensive empirical evidence on recent theories that link democracy and income inequality for the period 1960-1995. In simple cross-country regressions I find a non-monotonic link between these two variables when using ordinary least squares, instrumental...

This study investigates the impact of Left political institutions on a nation's amount of poverty. Specifically, the analysis tests three possible causal relationships: whether Left political institutions affect poverty separately from the welfare state, channeled through the welfare state, or...

Why do political constituencies delegate decision power to representative assemblies? And how is the size of such assemblies determined? We analyze these questions of constitutional design in a model with voters learning their preferred alternative only after engaging in costly information...

This paper investigates on the demographic, economic, political and cultural determinants of direct democracy in 87 countries using an index of direct democracy. The test is interesting since there are important variations across these countries in the referendum and initiative use. We apply a...

This is the first study that assesses the economic effects of direct democratic institutions on a cross country basis. Its results are based on up to six new measures produced to reflect the legislative basis for using direct democratic institutions as well as their factual use. In addition, a...

The Grand Transition (GT) view claims that economic development is causal to institutional development, and that many institutional changes can be understood as transitions occurring at roughly the same level (zones) of development. The Primacy of Institutions (PoI) view claims that economic...