Cowen (2020) argues for a redirection of effort towards “State Capacity Libertarianism,” which keeps the core of policy proposals from libertarianism intact while emphasizing a select set of policies aimed at furthering economic growth. These policies center on the ability of the state to...

Despite repeated attempts to model conflict as contests over rent, few researchers have found a persuasive identification strategy to test these models. However, Lei and Michaels (2014) find that exogenous discoveries of “giant” oil fields are in fact associated with increased likelihood of...

We apply System GMM and Panel Vector Autoregression (PVAR) to investigate the long run relationships between output, human capital, liberalized political institutions, and liberalized economic institutions. We find consistent evidence that economic institutions and human capital both greatly...

There is an extensive literature on the presence of valuable natural resources creating a competition for control of central states and resource rents. This mechanism has been argued to be an important underlying factor preventing certain countries from acquiring good institutions and achieving...

This paper contributes to the literature on state capacity by creating a measure with far more comprehensive data coverage across time than has previously been possible. It uses data from the Varieties of Democracy dataset on fiscal capacity, a state's control over its territory, the rule of...