What do China, Estonia, Germany, India, Chile, South Korea and Slovakia all have in common? They have all enacted free-market reforms, and have seen their inhabitants’ living standards soar as a result. This essay describes how free-market policies have improved economic performance in these...

The ratings of political institutions are well-known and widely used in academic literature. These ratings are mostly based on expert evaluations. However, such evaluations can be subjective and occasionally driven by ideological considerations. In this paper we propose two new indicators of...

Ratings evaluating the quality of institutions are widely known; they are generally used in academic and research literature. Among such ratings are some whose compilation procedure took decades to perfect. Dozens of assessments have been accumulated, pertaining to a large and growing list of...

The ratings of economic and political institutions are well-known and widely used in the Social Science literature. These ratings are heavily relied on Experts' evaluations with subjective ordinal ranking (i.g., from -10 to 10 points). Such evaluations can be occasionally driven by ideological...

Notes on the Endogenous Generation of Political Competition. An attempt at a formalized description of the formation process of constitutionally limited Government when a balance of forces is preserved among the “bandits” (strongmen) competing for power. Magna Carta treaty as institution,...

Advocates of the war against discrimination and affirmative action claim it is necessary to set up additional regulatory procedures that will defend interests of minorities who, previously, were not given enough chances to succeed. Because there is no set definition of a minority who suffered...

We start out from the hypothesis that limited government leads to low uncertainty and low transaction costs. If political institutions affect the degree of uncertainty and transaction costs, we formally show they should affect the steady state level of income per capita. The impact of...