The authors demonstrate that sharply different policy choices across democracies can be explained as a consequence of differences in the ability of political competitors to make credible pre-electoral commitments to voters. Politicians can overcome their credibility deficit in two ways. First,...

In "Evaluating Recipes for Development Success" Avinash Dixit criticizes recent efforts to identify the "fundamental" causes of development and to distill policy recommendations from these efforts. This comment focuses on the strand of that literature related to institutions and development. Two...

This working paper advances research on inequality with unique, new data on income distribution in 61 countries, including 20 Latin American countries, to explore the effects of political parties on redistribution. First, consistent with a central, but still contested, assumption of the...

Douglass North (1990) describes institutions as the rules of the game that set limits on human behavior, now a universally-accepted definition. North and others especially underline the crucial role of informal social norms. They predict that, like all rules of the game, social norms should...

We reconstruct a dataset used by Persson and Tabellini (AER, 1994) to test the robustness of their finding that inequality reduces income growth, but only in democracies. We find that their result is highly sensitive to the use of data sources on both democracy and inequality. When we substitute...

Economic consequences of terrorism in developed and developing countries : an overview / Walter Enders and Todd Sandler -- The costs of responding to the terrorist threat : the U.S. case / Gregory F. Treverton ... [et al.] -- From (no) butter to guns? understanding the economic role in...