This volume offers two important contributions to the literature on sovereign debt. First, it provides a unique genealogy of debt collection practices in terms of their availability, acceptability and efficacy. We argue that creditors' tactics and methods to enforce debt repayment emerged and...

Tax havens have become a subject of great interest among policymakers, scholars and the general public, and are central to many important current policy debates. This chapter provides an overview of the scholarly literature on the characteristics and origins of tax havens. The earlier...

We explore the determinants of state fragility in sub-Saharan Africa. Controlling for a wide range of economic, demographic, geographic and istitutional regressors, we find that institutions, and in particular the civil liberties index and the number of revolutions, are the main determinants of...

This paper links banking systems development to the colonial and legal history of African countries. Specifically, we investigate the impact of differing legal traditions on the development of existing investor and creditor protection, and on African banking systems. Based on a sample of 40...

This paper links banking systems development to the colonial and legal history of African countries. Specifically, we investigate the impact of differing legal traditions on the development of existing investor and creditor protection, and on African banking systems. Based on a sample of 40...

This paper links banking system development to the colonial and legal history of African countries. Based on a sample of 40 African countries from 2000 to 2018, our empirical findings show a significant dependence of current financial institutions on the inherited legal origin and the...

This paper ties into a new literature that aims to quantify the long-term economic effects of historical European settlement, arguing for the need to properly address the role of indigenous agency in path-dependent settlement processes. We conduct three comparative case studies in West, East and...

This article explores the empirical determinants of state fragility in sub-Saharan Africa over the 1992–2007 period. Our dataset includes those sub-Saharan countries for which we have information on the distribution by quintiles of the World Bank Country Policy and Institutional...

Review of the monograph: Marion Wallace with John Kinahan, A History of Namibia: From the Beginning to 1990, London: Hurst, 2011, ISBN 978-1-84904-091-4 (hardback), 451 pp.

A recent body of literature has claimed that differences in long-run economic performance within the Americas stem from the different institutional structures established during colonial times. This research tries to find evidence of institutional persistence in Colombia using direct measures of...