The paper begins with a critique of the literature on private sector governance, noting that it emerged at a moment of excessive and misplaced faith in the viability of a private sector driven by lightly regulated financial and private equity markets. The underlying models of corporate...

This paper uses a historical natural experiment – the opening of the Suez Canal – to investigate the relationship between geography and the formation of institutions. While the conventional view is that good geography (commodity endowment) inevitably favours the creation of extractive...