What accounts for cross-national variation in political clientelism? We consider two prominent explanations, economic wealth and state capacity, and test them on a new dataset of political clientelism. Although economic wealth is a strong predictor of contemporaneous clientelism, especially for...

We exploit differences in casualties sustained in pre-modern wars to estimate the impact of fiscal capacity on economic performance. In the past, states fought different amounts of external conflicts, of various lengths and magnitudes. To raise the revenues to wage wars, states made fiscal...

The world is experiencing its worst recession in 80 years. What started as US sub-prime financial turmoil has developed into the first global recession since the infamous 'Great Depression' of the early 1930s. However gloomy the perspectives for the very short term are, there will be a recovery...