We present a simple model that illustrates how democracy may improve the quality of economic institutions. The model further suggests that institutional quality varies more across autocracies than across democracy and that the positive effect of democracy on institutional quality is increasing...

German separation in 1949 into a communist East and a capitalist West and their reunification in 1990 are commonly described as a natural experiment to study the enduring effects of communism. We show in three steps that the populations in East and West Germany were far from being randomly...

The paper analyzes local political cycle in Czech municipalities over the period between 1997 and 2013. We apply the system and the difference GMM estimators to detect electoral manipulation in current and capital expenditures in electoral and pre-electoral years. Primarily, we estimate the...

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 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...

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...

Can state-owned banks spur development? Gerschenkron (1962) identified the State Bank of the Rus- sian Empire as the main institutional driver of the country's catch-up industrialization. In this paper, we test this assertion by evaluating the outcome of a policy experiment (1892-1903) under the...

This paper shows how colonial powers permanently shaped the pattern of Chinese cities through the establishment of Concessions - foreign enclaves within Chinese cities. Based on a sample of 130 city districts within 10 Chinese cities, we find that districts with Concessions have higher land...