Most political scientists and economists unequivocally accept the proposition that abundant mineral resources are more often a curse than a blessing, particularly for developing countries. We argue that the widely accepted contention that an abundance of mineral resources and the influx of...

We present a simple model, illustrating how democracy may improve the quality of the economic institutions. The model further suggests that institutional quality varies more across autocracies than across democracy and that the positive effect of democracies on economic institutional quality...

"The authors examine how well several institutional and firm-level factors and their interactions explain firms' perceptions of property rights protection. Their sample includes private and public firms that vary in size from very small to large in 62 countries. Together, the institutional...