This article is an empirical inquiry into the nature and causes of the preservation and reuse of railway heritage from a comparative point of view. It addresses the question of why this heritage is not preserved in Andalusia (Spain). Railway heritage is a mixed good, as a public good requires...

This essay criticizes the commonplace definition of corruption as the misuse of public office for private gain. Both elements in this definition are wrong: corruption is also found in the private sector and in some exceptional cases it may not simply be for private gain. Another problem with...

This work aims to shedding light on the nature and causes of severe unemployment in the Spanish region of Andalusia — 34 per cent of the active population, three times the EU average. Far from explanations based on neoclassical economics or external to the region or simply truisms, I sought...

Innovation policy is normally evaluated from the welfare perspective of market failure, and therefore focuses on social benefits. This paper adapts the Djankov et al. (2003) model of comparative social costs associated with any institution to analyse the specific institutions of innovation...

Many scholars, since the early 2000s, advocate for the integration of institutionalist and communitarian views of social capital generation in order to explain civil society dynamics, in particular in countries ? such as former communist states - characterized by transitional processes, with a...

This article responds to the question: "Capitalism: What has gone wrong, what needs to change and how to fix it" for a special volume on capitalism in Oxford Review of Economic Policy. Debates on capitalism get muddled by blind spots about essential institutions, particularly effective...

This survey reviews the recent research on trust, institutions and growth. It discusses the various measures of trust and documents the substantial heterogeneity of trust across space and time. The conceptual mechanisms and the methods employed to identify the causal impact of trust on economic...

Social trust is linked to many desirable economic and social outcomes, but the causality between trust and institutions is debated. Using new data from a representative sample of 2,668 Swedish expatriates (surveyed in the SOM Institute's Swedish Expatriate Survey 2014), we use variation in time...