This paper examines how social relations and norms contribute to the emergence of generalized trust in economic action. Our core proposition is that the more positive the local social exchange relationship, the greater an actor’s propensity to place trust in strangers. Our research design...

Recent research on financial market development has focused on the nature of the legal system. The law and finance literature, however, exclusively focuses on the abuse of management power as a major cause of shareholder expropriation. We examine the role of the administrative capability of the...

More than 630 million Chinese have escaped poverty since the 1980s, reducing the fraction remaining from 82 to 10 percent of the population. This astonishing decline in poverty, the largest in history, coincided with the rapid growth of a private enterprise economy. Yet private enterprise in...

The aim of this paper is to specify a theory to explain why transitions to a market economy cause a shift to a higher level of innovation. Marketization increases the power of economic actors relative to political actors, increases inter-firm competition, creates new opportunities for...