The essay is based on the knowledge that institutional quality may influence economic performance. From this viewpoint, it is possible to demonstrate that under certain circumstances, governmental policy is able to increase economic efficiency and performance by creating, maintaining, and...

Economists have used cross-national regression analysis to argue that postcommunist economic failure is the result of inadequate adherence liberal economic policies. Sociologists have relied on case study data to show that postcommunist economic failure is the outcome of too close adherence to...

This paper uses a formal model to analyze the effects of political economic competition between states on economic performance and the size and composition of the public sector. Great economies of scale in warfare and even distributions of military capability among the contestants generate...

A fundamental question about the determinants of civil conflict is the relative importance of political freedoms versus economic development. This paper takes a new approach to provide an answer by using micro-data based on surveys of revolutionary tastes of 130,000 people living in 61 nations...

Property rights, whose security is often threatened by civil conflict, are a necessary condition for the establishment of a market economy. Yet a fundamental and unresolved empirical question is whether the lack of political and civil freedoms is one of the root causes of greater insecurity....

Empirical research has shown that cultural values matter for economic growth and has specifically identified the achievement motivation as an aspect of culture that engenders economic growth. If specific cultural values engender economic growth, how then can societies promote them? This paper...

Declining general trust has become a serious social issue in China in recent years. This paper attempts to understand and analyze this social phenomenon from a social interaction perspective. Based on a repeated prisoners ́dilemma game on networks, it finds that the evolution of general trust...

The concepts social innovation and social entrepreneurship have gained considerable attention both in different fields of academic research and in the context of the development of economic and social policies. However, despite its wide-spread use there does not exist a unique or at least widely...

This paper studies whether institutions matter for economic performance. For this aim, we first construct a simple framework illustrating how to examine the interaction between institutions and economic performance from a different point of view. Then, using this framework, we introduce an...