Societal theories of trade policy stress the importance of domestic interest groups, whereas statist theories focus on the effects of domestic institutions. Debates over the relative merits of these approaches have been fierce, but little systematic empirical research has been brought to bear on...

Why do some countries adopt market-oriented reforms such as deregulation, privatization and liberalization of competition in their infrastructure industries while others do not? Why did the pace of adoption accelerate in the 1990s? Building on neo-institutional theory in sociology, we argue that...

The empirical evidence that links political institutions to economic outcomes has grown dramatically in recent years. However, virtually all of this analysis is undertaken using data from the past three decades. This paper extends this empirical framework by performing a two-century long...

Coercive isomorphism is a prominent source of institutional change. The literature to date has emphasized how actors that are powerful and legitimate (for example, a national government) may coerce the adoption of reforms by dependent actors (for example, state governments and other...

We apply the logic of comparative institutional analysis to the question of the governance of the relationship between private investors and the government. We consider two strategies that investors may follow: lobbying for the creation of a specialized political governance structure and relying...