This paper argues that even a free market is only free in a particular country because that state allows it to be so. Of course it goes without saying that the pressures of the market, together with the institutions of neoliberalism like the austerity wavering IMF and the World Bank, plus the...

We provide evidence that democracy has a significant and robust positive effect on GDP. Our empirical strategy relies on a dichotomous measure of democracy coded from several sources to reduce measurement error and controls for country fixed effects and the rich dynamics of GDP, which otherwise...

In this paper we revisit the relationship between institutions, human capital and development. We argue that empirical models that treat institutions and human capital as exogenous are misspecified both because of the usual omitted variable bias problems and because of differential measurement...

Dutch settlements on the coastal plain locked Guyana into polder agriculture and inadvertently a small widely dispersed population. The former requires high cost for drainage, irrigation and agricultural production. The latter implies the high costs – including the cost of infrastructure –...

In this review we synthetize the existing contributions that use econometric approaches to examine the influence of institutions and governance on environmental policy, environmental outcomes, and investments. The paper describes how the relationship between institutions and various response...

This paper examines interconnections between law, politics and the quality of government in Africa. We investigate whether African democracies enjoy relatively better government quality compared to their counterparts with more autocratic inclinations. The empirical evidence is based on...

This overview paper introduces some basic concepts of New Institutional Economics like the conceptualization of institutions as the rules of the game and then focuses on the two basic mechanisms of emergence and evolution of social institutions, i.e. as a product of collective action or as a...

We present a new aggregation method - called SVM algorithm - and use this technique to produce novel measures of democracy (186 countries, 1960-2014). The method takes its name from a machine learning technique for pattern recognition and has three notable features: it makes functional...

Economic freedom is robustly associated with income growth, but does this association extend to the poorest in a society? In this paper, we employ Canada’s longitudinal cohorts of income mobility between 1982 and 2018 to answer this question. We find that economic freedom, as measured by the...