To the best of our knowledge, the empirical corpus of work on the origins and persistence of democracy has not evaluated the impact of governments' fiscal independence from peoples' taxes on the quality of democracy. Our proxy for fiscal independence is the component 1C titled "government...

Why do some countries indulge in financial repression, harming economic development in the process, whilst others promote financial development? Three main explanations have been put forth. Market failures, due to information asymmetries, mean that credit is rationed even when lenders could...