Property rights institutions, including contract enforcement, are recognized as a fundamental determinant to economic performance. However, understanding how to secure property remains elusive. This paper attempts to provide a theoretical framework and empirical analysis to unpack the black box...

Does culture affect the manner in which a society regulates the entry of new firms? Our results suggest it does. We find more individualistic countries regulate entry more lightly. This result is robust to different measures of individualism and to a variety of controls for cultural values and...

How does foreign aid affect recipient countries’ political institutions? Two competing hypotheses offer contradictory predictions. The first sees aid, when delivered correctly, as an important means of making dictatorial recipient countries more democratic. The second sees aid as a corrosive...

Despite the rapid growth of emerging donors, these non-traditional donors are historically left out of the discussion on aid effectiveness. In this paper, we provide the first full evaluation of aid agency best practices. We rank and compare DAC (Development Assistance Committee) donors,...

Using data from 2004-2008-2012, we provide the first multi-year agency monitoring of Development Assistance Committee (DAC), multilateral, and United Nations (UN) agencies. Our results suggest that, on average, DAC donor performance has declined while multilateral and UN agency performance has...

This paper is the first to investigate the relationship between think tanks and economic policy empirically. We use panel data for the US states to examine state-based, free market (SBFM) think tanks’ relationship to eight key economic policy objectives. We find little evidence that SBFM think...

Elderly have been increasingly targeted as a group to enhance economic development and the tax base in communities. While recent literature on elderly migration tends to focus on how elderly migration patterns are influenced by state fiscal variables, the reverse effect from elderly population...

The appropriate role of foreign aid in promoting economic development has long been debated. With the recent change of focus from economic to human development, it is timely to investigate the effectiveness of aid in promoting human development. This paper is the first to empirically test the...

This paper explores how expanding the notion of informal institutions in the broader institutional framework provides a more complete explanation for development. Specifically, I incorporate McCloskey's notion of ‘dignity and liberty’ as part of the institutional nexus. By doing so, a richer...