We test the reproducibility and replicability of Dincecco et al. (2022), which reports a positive relationship between pre-colonial interstate warfare and long-run development patterns across India. Overall, we confirm that all of the study's estimates are computationally reproducible by using...

Indonesia’s 1999 decentralization law gave local governments in Indonesia an unprecedented opportunity to adopt pro-development policies. We estimate the effect of decentralization (enacted in 2001) on national economic performance using a synthetic case control methodology. Our results...

Since open competition began three years ago, the mobile penetration rate in Taiwan has climbed from 6.86 to 72.3 percent. This paper seeks to explain the cause of Taiwan!?s unprecedented mobile growth and to suggest policy strategies useful for countries interested in expanding their...

Sun Tzu’s Art of War is well-known for its influence in both strategic and management studies. However, most research has overlooked the Art of War produced by Sun Tzu’s descendent, Sun Pin. This text, while not as easily interpreted as its more famous ancestor, also contains discussions of...

The international emergence and expansion of Islamic finance is an undeniable fact. Significant efforts from all stakeholders including regulatory bodies are currently under way to formulate universal framework, standards and codes of conduct for Islamic finance. This is necessary because of the...

Critical scholarship views corporate accumulation – a fundamental driver of capitalism – as inherently dispossessive, involving violence and expropriation. However, dispossession also involves practices of legitimation that are related to coercive violence in complex ways. We examine the...

This research explores how salt monopoly, a widespread but costly institution in the pre-modern world, induced mafia-type secret societies in Qing China. Constructing a panel dataset comprising 1638 counties and using salt price regulation as a policy shock, I find that the enforcement of salt...

Despite being a fixture of everyday life in the Arab world, wasta, which may be thought of as special influence by members of the same group or tribe, has received little attention from social scientists. Our casual empiricism suggests that wasta is an important determinant of how economic...

This paper proposes the following mechanism whereby polarization of beliefs could eliminate political gridlock instead of intensifying disagreement: the expectation of political payoffs from being proven correct by a policy failure could drive decision makers who do not believe in the new policy...