The institutional economics if John Commons (1934) contained two related objectives. The first was to explain the evolution of economics. The second was to analyze the effects of institutions on resource allocation and the distribution of income. The method of explaining the evolution of...

The paper explores the link between authoritative media, which is called the public court in the paper, and economic prosperity. Three types of evidence are used. First, arguments of the superiority of the public court over traditional media are provided. Second, a formal model shows a causal...

This paper presents an index of institutionalized social technologies covering its two main dimensions namely Risk reducing technologies and Anti Rent seeking technologies and in turn covers several social, institutional, political and economic aspects. Specifically it attempted to classify and...

Drawing from the literature on the determinants of corruption, this article examines the relationship between corruption and the nature of state of fragility. Robust empirical evidence shows a correlation between the level of corruption and state fragility. In a further assessment with the...

Decline and break-up of institutionalized cooperation, at all levels, has occurred frequently. Some of its concomitants, such as international migration, have become topical in the globalized world. Aspects of the phenomenon have also become known as failing states. However, the focus in most...

In the latter half of the fourth millennium BC, our ancestors witnessed a remarkable transformation, progressing from simple agrarian villages to complex urban civilizations. In regions as far apart as the Nile Valley, Mesopotamia, Central Asia, and the Indus Valley, the first states appeared...

Institutions, defined as "the rules of the game in society", drive economic growth and prosperity. Institutions often arise from long-term processes influenced by geography, major historical events, culture, and, less commonly, religion. This chapter reviews the available evidence to demonstrate...

How deep are the roots of Latin America's economic inequalities? In this chapter we survey both the history and the literature about the region's extreme economic disparities, focusing on the most recent academic contributions. We begin by documenting the broad patterns of national and...

We improve and investigate a dynamic model of the behavior of the population of agents belonging to different income groups during the transition from a pay-as-you-go to a mixed pension system. The model is based on the assumption that wealthier participants are characterized by a lower rate of...

This paper investigates the influence of institutional quality on innovation performance in developing countries by employing annual data from 1997-2014. The system-generalized method of moments (GMM) is used as the empirical method. Estimation results reveal that bureaucratic quality,...