Most quantitative researchers had agreed that regime type and war involvement are not significantly related to each other until Rummel recently challenged this consensus. According to Rummel, libertarian or democratic states are less intensively involved in foreign conflict and tend to...

Rent-seeking societies suffer from a serious distortion of incentives. Incentives to engage in distributional struggles, to seek contrived transfers are strong, but incentives to engage in productive work are too weak. Stagnation and some unemployment should be expected. Long lasting democracies...

Research about the effects of regime type on economic growth rates did not establish any robust differences in average growth rates between democracies and autocracies. Here, it is suggested that we may have asked the wrong question. There still might be a difference in variances. Democracy...

Standard indicators of human capital endowment ¿ like literacy, school enrollment ratios or years of schooling ¿ suffer from a number of defects. They are crude. Mostly, they refer to input rather than output measures of human capital formation. Occasionally, they produce implausible effects....