This contribution is one of the lead articles to the forthcoming Handbook of Political, Social, and Economic Transformation. It discusses the main contributions from the New Institutional Economics to transformation research but also identifies a number of research gaps

Several studies have examined the relationship between environmental degradation and economic growth. However, most of them did not take into account financial developments and institutional quality. Moreover, Stern (2004) noted that there are important econometric weaknesses in the earlier...

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