This research advances the hypothesis and establishes empirically that interpersonal population diversity, rather than fractionalization or polarization across ethnic groups, has been pivotal to the emergence, prevalence, recurrence, and severity of intrasocietal conflicts. Exploiting an...

In the main paper we propose two new indicators of de facto constitutional constraints. The indicators are based on the presence or the absence of easily observable political events. This makes the proposed measures relatively objective and easy to verify relative to the most widely used...

Why do some societies fail to adopt more efficient institutions in response to changing economic conditions? And why do such conditions sometimes generate ideological backlashes and at other times lead to transformative sociopolitical movements? We propose an explanation that highlights the...

Why do some societies fail to adopt more efficient institutions in response to changing economic conditions? And why are such failures often associated with a rise in traditional ideological beliefs? We propose an explanation that highlights the interplay ― or lack thereof ― between...

Theories of early state formation posit that the state enabled an emerging elite to extract resources in exchange for protection from outside groups. This paper formalizes and empirically evaluates these forces in a unified framework. The model shows that extraction is closely linked to the idea...

Why do some societies fail to adopt more efficient political and economic institutions in response to changing economic conditions? And why do such conditions sometimes generate conservative ideological backlashes and, at other times, progressive social and political movements? We propose an...

This paper undertakes a descriptive analysis of changes in economic institutions across countries from 2000-2016, using Economic Freedom of the World and the “State Economic Modernity” index. This latter index is a recent creation, similar conceptually to state capacity, measuring what can...

Mass deportations and killings of Ottoman Armenians during WWI and the Greek-Turkish population exchange after the Greco-Turkish War of 1919-1922 were the two major events of the early 20th century that permanently changed the ethno-religious landscape of Anatolia. These events marked the end of...

Did individual British officers determine the institutional development of former colonies? The article presents a new research program into institutional reform and economic development based on a newly established dataset of over 14,000 biographical entries of senior colonial officers in 54...

This paper uses newly gathered and available data and autoregressive methods to create an economic freedom index for the 1950s and 1960s for up to 95 countries. This index is designed to be as compatible as possible with the Economic Freedom of the World (EFW) index published annually by the...