1989 was described as lsquo;annus mirabilis', and its revolutions hailed as one of the great moments in human history. In subsequent years, the re-emergence of war, genocide and terror led to re-interpretation: Europe became a dark continent, the 20th century its darkest hour. Was 1989 merely a...

Coups and regime transitions are events that typically are intended to change the basic institutional framework of a country. Which specific policies change and the consequences of these changes nevertheless remains largely unknown. Change after a coup or transition implies that some form of...

Leading theories of institutional and economic development emphasize the role of informal norms and the strength of civil society. Though informal norms and civil society are usually thought to change incrementally, exposure to violent conflict may shock these institutions. Well identified...

One of the consequences of the post-socialist transformation of Eastern and Central Europe and the Former Soviet Union is the emergence of energy poverty, a condition where households are living in inadequately heated homes. This paper examines the institutional and demographic underpinnings of...

In this paper, I argue that religion matters for the emergence of democracies and dictatorships. Religion is defined as demand for public goods. Different types of religious collectives reflect different tradeoffs between centralized resource distribution and market rewards. Religions are...

Growth empirics with institutional measures is performed for 25 transition countries overthe period 1990-95. Estimation results suggest that (particularly state) institutions aresignificant for growth and, especially, foreign direct investment (FDI), the latter in turnbeing important for the...

In this paper we examine the empirical relationship between economic openness and nationalism. We replicate and extend the cross-country analysis of Lan and Li (2015) using additional measures of nationalism and additional years of data from the World Values Survey. We fail to find the negative...

Most of countries have been badly affected by the tremendous global financial crisis and economic downturn happening recently. It is really difficult to predict the timing and magnitude of events caused by the global economic crises, the effects of the crisis vary from country to country. It has...

The article focuses on effectiveness of Investment climate in Georgia after transition period. Investment climate is the institutional, policy and regulatory environment in whichfirms operate - factors that influence the link from sowing to reaping and I can say that investment climate itself is...