The Grand Transition (GT) view claims that economic development is causal to institutional development, and that many institutional changes can be understood as transitions occurring at roughly the same level (zones) of development. The Primacy of Institutions (PoI) view claims that economic...

The political and economic impact of country size has been a frequently discussed issue in social science. In accordance with the general hypothesis of Montesquieu, this paper demonstrates that there is a robust negative relationship between the size of country territory and a measure of the...

This paper decomposes the resource curse and its potential reversal in three important dimensions; type of resource, type of institutional measure, and time. Studying components of primary exports we find that the curse is (to various degrees) present for all components but that its possible...

The agricultural transition, the demographic transition and the democratic transition explain the development paths of the share of agriculture, the population growth rate, and the standard democracy indices. We demonstrate that two related estimation models give contradictory results when...

The paper develops a model of proportionate growth to describe the dynamics of international trade flows. We show that a large number of the empirical regularities characterizing international trade — such as the fraction of zero trade flows across pairs of countries, the positive relationship...