International comparisons of labour market institutions and their transfer across boundaries have gained in importance. The paper deals with the question of the best way to proceed in making such comparisons. At the same time the question of the possibilities and limits to institutional transfer...

Why do sudden and massive social, economic, and political changes occur when and where they do? Are there institutional preconditions that encourage such changes when present and discourage such changes when absent? In this paper, I employ a general model which suggests that massive equilibrium...

This study provides evidence that strong kin networks are detrimental for democratic participatory institutions and that the medieval Catholic Church’s marriage regulations dissolved Europe’s clan-based kin networks which contributed to the emergence of participatory institutions. I show...

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are increasingly used by corporations for benchmarking and communicating their sustainability performance. The SDGs have several features that make them attractive for this purpose, including their universality, specificity and, in many cases, direct...

This essay investigates the determinants of the growth performance of Africa. I start by illustrating a broader research agenda which accounts not only for basic economic and demographic factors, but also for the role of history and institutional development. After reporting results from...

This paper presents an attempt to quantify institutional changes and examine the respective effects of de jure and de facto political institutions on the path of long-run economic growth and development for a large panel of countries in the period 1810–2000. Using factor analysis, latent...

Major moves in Colombia's stock market in the 2000s correspond to major news of progress or setbacks in rebuilding the country's institutions, shattered by widespread guerrilla insurgencies in the 1990s. This contrasts with prior work reporting no news on major market moves in the US, a country...

International migration is an important determinant of institutions, not considered so far in the development literature. Using cross-section and panel analysis for a large sample of developing countries, we find that openness to emigration (as measured by the natives' average emigration rate)...

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...

The contention that “inclusive” institutions are the deep determinants of economic growth remains unsatisfactory. This paper develops an alternative theoretical and empirical case that economic structures are the fundamental cause of economic performance. Economic structures determine the...