This paper considers the problem of why societies develop differently, a question most recently articulated by Acemoglu and Robinson (2012). We follow North (1990) in defining institutions as the "rules of the game in society." The question then becomes why do different societies develop...

The effect of constitutional structures (such as the effect of a presidential vs. a parliamentary system) over policy outcomes has been widely studied in the economic literature. In this paper, we investigate whether stable parliamentary systems and unstable parliamentary systems behave...

Recent studies emphasize the occurrence of conflict as a rational economic activity as well as production and exchange. Agents are assumed to divide their efforts into fighting and productive activities, or as commonly denoted in 'guns' and 'butter'. This paper does try to go beyond this...

This paper investigates the impact of judiciaries on firms' contracting behaviour and economic performance. In 2002, the Code of Civil Procedure Amendment Act was enacted in India to facilitate speedy disposal of civil suits. Some State High Courts had already enacted some of the amendments...

We study parties' optimal ideological cohesion across electoral rules, when the following trade-off is present: A more heterogenous set of candidates is electorally appealing (catch-all party), yet, it serves policy-related goals less efficiently. When the rule becomes more disproportional, thus...

Broadly speaking, institutional reformers decide about the sequencing of types of reforms, either addressing institutional quality or macroeconomic stability. This paper develops a dynamic population game, in which agents play a simple anonymous-exchange game of cooperating or defecting. Agents...

Ethnic and religious fractionalization have important effects on economic growth and development, but their role in internal violent conflicts has been found to be negligible and statistically insignificant. These findings have been invoked in refutation of the Huntington hypothesis, according...

The Axial Age, which lasted between 800 B. C. E. and 200 B. C. E., covers an era in which the spiritual foundations of humanity were laid simultaneously and independently in various geographic areas, and all three major monotheisms of Judaism, Christianity and Islam were born between 1200 B. C....