Banks failed in 2008 because individuals with knowledge of risks were not connected to individuals who had the incentive and power to take corrective action. Evidence of this problem is provided by reports from the Lehman liquidator and The US Government Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission....

Historical evidence suggests that poor population groups are more likely to engage in conflict. We construct a theoretical model of the choice between appropriation and production. Fully specified production functions allow for both symmetrical outcomes and for introducing inequalities in...

Solar geoengineering has received increasing attention as an option to temporarily stabilize global temperatures. A key concern surrounding these technologies is that heterogeneous preferences over the optimal amount of cooling combined with low deployment costs may allow the country with the...

We examine whether frontier rule, which disallows frontier residents from a recourse to formal institutions of conflict management and disproportionately empowers tribal elites, provides a more fragile basis for maintaining social order in the face of shocks. Combining a historical border...

The globalisation of the economy goes along with numerous kinds of uncertainty and requires adequate institutional designs in order to avoid disadvantageous situations from the actors' points of view. Institutional designs usually consist of a mix of different institutions that are adapted to...

This paper introduces and describes a new city-level data set on political institutions in pre-modern Europe. To be precise, it presents three variables reporting the prevalence of the different existing types of participative political institutions between 800 AD and 1800 AD in 104 cities in...

Florian Dorn erstellte diesen Beitrag während seines Promotionsstudiums an der Universität München (LMU). Die Studie wurde im September 2020 abgeschlossen und von der Fakultät für Volkswirtschaftslehre als Dissertation angenommen. Die Dissertation trägt zur Empirie der Ökonomie des...

The purpose of the paper is to show that the nature of the relationship between governance and democracy varies depending on how the two terms (of a political discourse) are defined, that when the definition of one term encompasses distinctive features of the other we find that governance and...

There is widespread concern, especially in certain feminist circles, that a market-oriented economic system, or capitalism, disfavors women. This could take many forms, such as lower wages for the same type of work, reduced career opportunities, disparities in ownership and the upholding of...

This paper examines determinants of revolutionary behaviour. We study the role of freedom of communication, repression of opposition and the government's selfishness. Combining econometric analysis of survey data with a laboratory experiment, we analyse how these factors affect preferences for...