Vikings – the Scandinavian seafaring populations that dominated the North Seas between the eighth and eleventh centuries CE – are usually described as pirates and warriors living in a highly aggressive society. But was this really the case? How violent were the Vikings among themselves? In...

Despite the economic relevance of strong political and property rights, we still lack an organic and empirically sound theory of their origins and interaction. In our model, the elite can elicit the nonelite's cooperation in investment by enacting a more inclusive political process, which allows...

espite the vast evidence on the economic relevance of the state's institutional capacity to provide public goods and incentivize risk-sharing and innovation, we lack an organic and empirically sound theory of its origins. To help fill this gap, we develop a theory of state formation shedding...