Few social scientists have equaled the impact on political science of Douglass C. North, co-winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics in 1993. His extraordinary influence emanated from his ideas but was also a result of his vast social network of collaborators, students, and friendly...

This paper presents evidence of political legacies of exposure to a violent class conflict over 100 years. We revisit the Finnish Civil War of 1918 and first trace out the impact of local conflict exposure on electoral outcomes over a quarter-century period between the World Wars. The electoral...

This study examines how quality of political institutions affects the distribution of government budget in Iran. We first introduce a mechanism through which this can shift government expenditure from patronage to more constructive public spending. Using impulse response functions (IRF) and...

This paper studies how comparative advantage and the political elites' endowments shape long-run performance in an economy with imperfect political institutions. In a capital-scarce economy, an autocrat catering to the needs of landowners favours openness to trade at an early stage of...

Adam Smith characterized the medieval Roman Catholic Church as a force impeding Europe’s process of development. The Church was, in Smith words, “the most formidable combination that ever was formed against the authority and security of civil government, as well as against the liberty,...

This paper studies how former interest groups’ employees turned politicians (who we label as lobbyist legislators) influence the voting behavior of their colleague legislators. Using the alphabetic allocation of seats in the European Parliament and detailed individual résumé information, we...

This paper analyzes the economic foundations of a non-democratic political regime, where the ruling bureaucracy captures rents through collective control over state property and job assignment. The model developed here yields the equilibrium in the 'political labor market,' where the ruling...

We suggest a new class of cross-sectional space-time models based on local AR models and nearest neighbors using distances between observations. For the estimation we use a tightness prior for prediction of regional GDP forecasts. We extend the model to the model with exogenous variable model...