In the 19th century, the Liverpool Cotton Brokers Association (CBA) coordinated the dramatic growth of Liverpool's raw cotton market. This article shows how the CBA achieved this through the development of a private order institutional framework that improved information flows, introduced...

What factors caused the persecution of minorities in medieval and early modern Europe? We build a model that predicts that minority communities were more likely to be expropriated in the wake of negative income shocks. Using panel data consisting of 1,366 city-level persecutions of Jews from 936...

Did the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars contribute to the Industrial Revolution? Recent scholarship argues warfare was an important factor in explaining Britain's industrialisation, by encouraging the invention and diffusion of key technologies with military applications. I re-examine...

Coups and regime transitions are events that typically are intended to change the basic institutional framework of a country. Which specific policies change and the consequences of these changes nevertheless remains largely unknown. Change after a coup or transition implies that some form of...

Exploiting a novel geo-referenced data set of population diversity across ethnic groups, this research advances the hypothesis and empirically establishes that variation in population diversity across human societies, as determined in the course of the exodus of human from Africa tens of...

The contention that “inclusive” institutions are the deep determinants of economic growth remains unsatisfactory. This paper develops an alternative theoretical and empirical case that economic structures are the fundamental cause of economic performance. Economic structures determine the...

We present a simple model that illustrates how democracy may improve the quality of economic institutions. The model further suggests that institutional quality varies more across autocracies than across democracy and that the positive effect of democracy on institutional quality is increasing...

This study presents a new framework of assessing the causal effect of institutions on economic growth via exploiting the exogenous variation in institutions triggered by “peer pressure” exerted on governments by other states, affecting policy decisions and the environment national and...

The main aim of this study is to explain how institutional change, based on processes of democratization, governs the origin and diffusion of technological innovation across economies. This study suggests that institutional change, based on a progressive democratization of countries, is a...

Major moves in Colombia's stock market in the 2000s correspond to major news of progress or setbacks in rebuilding the country's institutions, shattered by widespread guerrilla insurgencies in the 1990s. This contrasts with prior work reporting no news on major market moves in the US, a country...