We present a simple model, illustrating how democracy may improve the quality of the economic institutions. The model further suggests that institutional quality varies more across autocracies than across democracy and that the positive effect of democracies on economic institutional quality...

We propose a mechanism for funding human capabilities development in situations where other resource channels (markets, banks, government policy or NGOs) are lacking or deficient. We lay out the conceptual framework for a new type of multi-stakeholders co-operative in which members are 1)...

The process of ethnogenesis (i.e. the formation of new ethnic groups) can be considered equivalent to the production of "governance goods" in situation of statelessness. The process of ethnogenesis is a response to the problem of social distance between heterogeneous groups which is a barrier to...

What do we know about the politics of corporate governance in emerging markets? While the state-level institutions have been amply explored, firm-level dynamics remain under-theorized. Complementing the orthodox emphasis on external finance as causal force behind the adoption of “minority...

This paper is concerned with the way economists conceptualize the relationship between politics and property rights. It is customary for economists to treat polity and economy as comprising separate domains of human action. In contrast, we treat society as a single domain of action comprised of...

Genetically modified (“GMO”) corn germinates legal controversies in México. Since 2013, Mexican courts have temporarily suspended GMO corn because it threatens biodiversity. In the Colectividad del Maíz lawsuit, courts have prohibited México from issuing commercial GMO permits while the...

Much of the debate over the justice of immigration restrictions properly focuses on their impact on would-be migrants. For their part, restrictionists often focus on the potentially harmful effects of immigration on residents of receiving countries. This article cuts across this longstanding...

We present a simple model, illustrating how democracy may improve the quality of the economic institutions. The model further suggests that institutional quality varies more across autocracies than across democracy and that the positive effect of democracies on economic institutional quality...

How do property rights become secure? How does rule of law take hold in an economy? I use an original survey of 516 firms in Russia and Ukraine, as well as interview-based case studies, to re-examine these fundamental issues of political economy. Most states in the developing world lack the...

Using cross-country data, we find evidence for a significant negative interaction effect between democracy and inequality in determining the quality of growth-promoting institutions like rule of law. Democracy is associated with institutions of higher quality when inequality is lower.