This paper argues that economic competition and political contestability are two key determinants of the successful development of the Swiss economy in the nineteenth and twentieth century. We describe how Switzerland evolved from a relatively poor country with no natural resources and net...

Infrastruktur wird als zentrale Voraussetzung für Wirtschaftswachstum angesehen. Die Faktenlage zu den wirtschaftlichen Auswirkungen neuer Infrastrukturen sowie zu den Determinanten der Infrastruktur-Bereitstellung ist jedoch immer noch relativ spärlich. Die vorliegende Dissertation trägt mit...

This paper argues that economic competition and political contestability are two key determinants of the successful development of the Swiss economy in the nineteenth and twentieth century. We describe how Switzerland evolved from a relatively poor country with no natural resources and net...

This survey reviews the literature on the political economy of financial structure, broadly defined to include the size of capital markets and banking systems as well as the distribution of access to external finance across firms.The theoretical literature on the institutional basis for...

In the first years of the eurozone debt crisis, European governments were busy struggling to achieve short-term financial stabilisation of banks and entire countries. Now, after the OMT programme and other stabilisation measures have calmed investors, attention has shifted to two issues:...

The paper investigates empirically the interaction between economic growth performance and political institutions in producing free-market reform. In particular, we explore whether political regime types systematically shape government policy responses to good or bad growth performance,...

This essay provides a game-theoretic, endogenous view of institutions, and then applies the idea to identify the sources of institutional trajectories of economic development in China, Japan, and Korea. It stylizes the Malthusian-phase of East Asian economies as peasant-based economies in which...

We critically evaluate the empirical basis for the so-called resource curse and find that, despite the topic’s popularity in economics and political science research, this apparent paradox is a red herring. The most commonly used measure of ‘resource abundance’ can be more usefully...