The employment of financial development indicators without due consideration to country/regional specific financial development realities remains an issue of substantial policy relevance. Financial depth in the perspective of money supply is not equal to liquid liabilities in every development...

Resource abundance characterizes economies within the MENA region from North Africa to the Middle East. As such, to improve financial development (FD) for regional economic sustainability, this study provides a comprehensive analysis of the roles of natural resources abundance and institutional...

The World Bank Group's Doing Business Indicators (DBIs) have become an important guide and benchmark for investment climate reform. This article discusses the role of the DBIs in the reform process and informs this discussion with an empirical analysis of the impact of individual indicators and...

I investigate the link between business regulatory reforms and economic growth in 172 countries. I create a five year dataset on business regulatory reforms from the World Bank's Doing Business reports. Then, I test the hypothesis that business regulatory reforms increase economic growth, using...

This paper provides an empirical test of the Engerman–Sokoloff hypothesis that factor endowments influenced the development of the rule of law, which in turn has perpetuated income inequality. Using a measure of the suitability of land for growing wheat relative to sugarcane as an instrument...

There is a growing literature studying the effects of economic freedom and democracy on income inequality; nevertheless, the inequality-effects of both factors are apparently studied separately. This paper revisits the income inequality-economic freedom nexus and uncovers the role of political...

Did individual British officers determine the institutional development of former colonies? The article presents a new research program into institutional reform and economic development based on a newly established dataset of over 14,000 biographical entries of senior colonial officers in 54...

Exposure to violent conflict increases prosocial behavior, which is a form of social capital or informal institutions. This article studies whether these changes to informal institutions map into change to formal institutions, and if this mapping is characterized by substitutability or...

The main aim of this study is to explain how institutional change, based on processes of democratization, governs the origin and diffusion of technological innovation across economies. This study suggests that institutional change, based on a progressive democratization of countries, is a...

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...