Why are religious parties so popular in the new and emerging democracies of the Middle East and North Africa? This paper offers an alternative to the traditional accounts that stress religiosity, the repressive nature of the previous regimes, poverty and underdevelopment, or Arab grievances...

To what extent do imposed institutions shape preferences? We consider this issue by comparing the market-versus-state attitudes of respondents from a capitalist country, Finland, and an ex-communist group of Baltic countries, and by arguing that the period of communist rule can be viewed as an...

The idea of an identifiable school of thought denoted as Virginia political economy was in play at least as early as 1963, and it is reasonable to conclude that this identifier began to take shape some years earlier. It is common though not universal to identify a school of thought...

This paper looks at the integration of regions and nations through the prism of the merger of populations (societies). The paper employs a particular index of social stress. Stylized examples of the merging of two populations suggest that with integration, the social stress index will increase....

Strong financial markets are widely thought to propel economic development, with many in finance seeing legal tradition as fundamental to protecting investors sufficiently for finance to flourish. Kenneth Dam, in the Law-Growth Nexus, finds that the legal tradition view inaccurately portrays how...

In this paper, I document three stylized facts on leaders, institutions, and re-election incentives, using cross-country data: (1) in democracies, the positive relationship between leaders' performance and their capability is significantly less pronounced in their last term, when they do not...

Theoretical and empirical evidence on the relationship between institutions and economic prosperity remains ambiguous, even though it has been part of scholarly discourse for decades. The present study adds to this discussion by introducing a bundled approach for measuring institutions. This...

How can governments and companies be jointly empowered to have a positive impact on the sustainable development goals? The current economic system is largely geared towards increasing economic growth. But this could come at the expense of rising social inequality and environmental...

This paper studies whether institutions matter for economic performance. For this aim, we first construct a simple framework illustrating how to examine the interaction between institutions and economic performance from a different point of view. Then, using this framework, we introduce an...