This article investigates economic performance when enforceable property rights are missing and subsistence needs matter. It shows that if per capita income is sufficiently high, a windfall gain in productivity triggers behavior that leads to higher growth (the normal reaction). The same shock...

This paper aims at contributing to a better understanding of the conditions of self-enforcing democracy by analyzing the recent wave of autocratic transitions. Based on a game-theoretic framework, we work out the conditions under which governments may induce the diverse public authorities to...

We consider a variant of the Tullock rent-seeking contest. Under symmetric information we determine equilibrium strategies and prove their uniqueness. Then, we assume contestants to be privately informed about their costs of effort. We prove existence of a pure-strategy equilibrium and provide a...

Russia is one of the most heterogeneous countries, consisting of more than 80 regions. Among other features, its regions vary by their involvement in international trade and by vulnerability to external shocks. Russian economy is becoming more open, but openness of regions varies greatly,...

A country's form of government has important economic and political consequences, but the determinants that lead societies to choose either parliamentary or presidential systems are largely unexplored. This paper studies this choice by analyzing the factors that make countries switch from...

The relationship between decentralization and the quality of governments is one of the core issues of decentralization studies. This paper aims to make two contributions to this research. Firstly, we conduct an empirical analysis at the local level, covering 174 regions across the European...

Maritime location of Canada has not been questioned by many generations of researchers. However, a quick look at the map or the coastline measurements do not always allow to identify the real sources of its inalienable properties. Canada ranks first in coastline in the world and is formally "the...

The choice of centralizing tourism policies at the national level or, on the contrary, of decentralizing them at the local level is widely discussed in the literature, which highlights the related pros and cons. In fact, the simultaneous role of originator and attractor of tourism of each...

We examine whether and under which circumstances World Bank projects and IMF programs affect the likelihood of major government crises. Using a sample of more than 90 developing countries over the period 1970-2002, we find that crises are on average more likely in the presence of Bank and Fund...

It is often argued that a saticfactory institutional quality is prerequi- site for successfull financial integration. This paper analyzes the influence of financial integration on institutional quality. We construct a dynamic politico-economic model in which the ruling elite uses its political...