Foreign direct investment (FDI) is generally considered a driving factor to economic growth. Nevertheless, empirical evidence is rather mixed, reporting a positive, neutral, or even negative relationship of FDI with growth. Our investigation concentrates on the impact of FDI inflows on growth...

Corruption is widely believed to negatively affect economic growth. However, many East and Southeast Asia countries either achieved or currently are achieving impressively rapid economic growth despite widespread corruption - the 'East Asian Paradox'. Is this negative relationship equally likely...

Does a countrys level of inequality affect its ability to win Olympic medals? If it does, is it conditional on institutional factors? We argue that the ability of economically free societies to win medals will not be affected by inequality. In these societies, institutions generate incentives to...

This paper investigates the potential for a causal relationship between certain supply-side policies and UK output and productivity growth between 1970 and 2009. We outline an open economy DSGE model of the UK in which productivity growth is determined by the tax and regulatory environment faced...

In order to understand inefficient institutions, one needs to understand what mightcause the breakdown of a political version of the Coase Theorem. This paper considersan environment populated by ex-ante identical agents and develops a model of powerand distribution where institutions (the...

This paper proposes an original formal framework to analyze institutional evolution. Institutions have formal (F) and informal (N) aspects that may evolve at different paces, although eventually converging towards each other through an dynamic interactive process. N evolves with capital...

This volume comprises several studies and papers published in the last decades. They have been selected and ranged so that to provide a minimum of coherence concerning the phases which Romania has crossed in her way to the advanced socio-economic system of European type: transition to the market...

In this chapter, we describe the essence and role of the institutions in the modern economic systems, the main issues concerning the institutional convergence in relation to the EU integration, the institutional capital and the impact of the quality and effectiveness of the institutions on...

We survey the literature on venture capital and institutions and present a case study comparing the development of the venture capital market in the US to Sweden. Our literature survey underscores that the legal environment, financial market development, the tax system, labor market regulations,...

Societies in Western civilisation enforce their rules through formal institutions such as secularism (SES), whereas in less developed civilisations often rely on informal institutions such as religion (RES). The present paper attempts to explain the determinants of societies’ choice between...