In this paper, I explore the politically contested association between the degree of capitalism, captured by measures of economic freedom, and the risk and characteristics of economic crisis. After offering some brief theoretical considerations, I estimate the effects of economic freedom on...

The objective of this paper is to study the effect of institutional factors on economic growth of a set of 37 developed and developing countries for six successive periods of five years, from 1975 until 2000, using a static panel data model. The key findings generated by this empirical test...

We study the empirical relationship between the quality of economic institutions and ease of territorial exit in a cross-section of countries by introducing several new variables that measure how difficult or easy it is for citizens to exit. Theoretically, the easier it is to emigrate from a...

This study presents a new framework of assessing the causal effect of institutions on economic growth via exploiting the exogenous variation in institutions triggered by “peer pressure” exerted on governments by other states, affecting policy decisions and the environment national and...

This paper investigates the effects of inflation on per capita income growth for 36 developed and developing countries by using structural vector autoregression models that are robust to the consideration of endogeneity by construction. The results show evidence for heterogeneity of such effects...

Purpose: Relationship between institutions and economic growth is remain a controversial phenomena in case of SAARC countries (South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation). This article, recommends that the policy makers of these countries should make and implement such type of...

This study explains the emergence of the Sicilian mafia in the XIX century as the product of the interaction between natural resource abundance and weak institutions. We advance the hypothesis that the mafia emerged after the collapse of the Bourbon Kingdom in a context characterized by a severe...

This paper does three things. First, based on a limited number of theoretically established dimensions, it proposes a new de facto indicator for the rule of law. It is the first such indicator to take the quality of legal norms explicitly into account. Second, using this indicator we shed new...

Exploiting a novel geo-referenced data set of population diversity across ethnic groups, this research advances the hypothesis and empirically establishes that variation in population diversity across human societies, as determined in the course of the exodus of humans from Africa tens of...