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...

This paper presents new evidence on how demography affects attitudes toward democracy and policy preferences. The empirical analysis disentangles age effects from cohort effects and separates their role from economic and political factors that shape political preferences in a given period, using...

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...

This paper presents new evidence on how demography affects democratic attitudes in Western democracies. Using individual survey responses, the empirical analysis disentangles age from cohort patterns and other contemporaneous economic and political influences that shape democratic attitudes. The...

This paper presents new evidence on how demography affects democratic attitudes in Western democracies. Using individual survey responses, the empirical analysis disentangles age from cohort patterns and other contemporaneous economic and political influences that shape democratic attitudes. The...

Institutional settings and the resulting incentive structures are crucial for economic development. The type of entrepreneurial activity and the entrepreneurial effort are especially dependent on underlying incentive structures. We argue that institutions with better incentive structures for...

Before the Great Recession, rising income inequality within the European Union member states has been considered to be one driver for an increasing Euroskepticism. Using rich data on attitudes towards European integration from the Eurobarometer (EB) surveys, we revisit the issue by analyzing the...

Using a panel of up to 114 countries covering the years 1990 through 2010 we estimate the effect of Internet use on changes in countries' Economic Freedom of the World (EFW) scores. The point estimates suggest that the marginal effect is generally positive. However, starting from above-average...

Although a large literature argues that European settlement outside of Europe shaped institutional, educational, technological, cultural, and economic outcomes, researchers have been unable to directly assess these predictions because of an absence of data on colonial European settlement. In...

Bribes can either put "grease" or "sand" in the wheels of commerce, affecting firm performance (at the micro-level) and, ultimately, economic growth (at the macro-level). These two opposing hypotheses on the role corruption plays in countries with weak institutions raise an important empirical...