Purpose The paper provides a detailed historical account of Douglass C. North's early intellectual contributions and analytical developments in pursuing a Grand Theory for why some countries are rich and others poor. Design/methodology/approach The author approaches the discussion using a...

Most social problems are "wicked", meaning that they are highly complex, intractable, open-ended, and multi-dimensional. In wicked learning environments, information is ambiguous, feedback may be slow, or causes and effects are difficult to ascertain. Using the insights from the Bloomington...

This paper examines the state and evolution of the rule of law in Mozambique, focusing on key dimensions such as voice and political participation, judicial independence and accessibility, corruption, access to basic services, personal security, and property rights. Drawing on Afrobarometer...

This paper investigates the growth impact of the EU's Structural, Cohesion and Pre-accession Funds. We look at a large sample of 27 EU countries and the UK, over a period of 1989 and 2020, essentially covering the full history of these funds. We show that the growth effect of the funds is...

Homeownership rates and holdings of housing wealth differ immensely across countries. We specify and estimate a life cycle model with risky labor income and house prices in which households face a discrete-continuous choice between renting and owning a house, whose sale is subject to transaction...

Müller (2023) presents evidence for electoral cycles in macroprudential policy in a sample of 58 countries from 2000 through 2014. Consistent with theoretical arguments, the pattern of looser regulation is larger when election outcomes are uncertain and institutions are weak. In this...

This paper investigates the growth impact of the EU's Structural, Cohesion and Pre-accession Funds. We look at a large sample of 27 EU countries and the UK, over a period of 1989 and 2020, essentially covering the full history of these funds. We show that the growth effect of the funds is...

This study examines the emergence of international hidden entrepreneurs (IHEs) in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia through an institutional theory lens. An international hidden entrepreneur arises when local regulations impose high costs on an international entrepreneur operating as the legal head of...

This study employs the dynamic panel threshold estimation technique to examine whether the influence of financial inclusion on stability varies across countries with different levels of institutional development. This study analyzes 11,209 observations of bank-level data from 78 developed and...

To what extent can anti-corruption measures serve to limit patronage and corrupt networks effectively and sustainably in clientelist societies with a prevailing norm of corruption? We develop a political agency model in which office holders are motivated to reduce rent seeking behavior through...

Homeownership rates and holdings of housing wealth differ immensely across countries. We specify and estimate a life cycle model with risky labor income and house prices in which households face a discrete–continuous choice between renting and owning a house, whose sale is subject to...

Purpose The study examines the impact of macroeconomic risk and volatility associated with key macroeconomic indicators on financial market uncertainty; and the extent to which governance and institutional structures moderate such relationships. Design/methodology/approach The study employs data...

Homeownership rates and holdings of housing wealth differ immensely across countries. Using micro data from five economies, we estimate a life-cycle model with illiquid housing in which households face a discrete-continuous choice between renting and owning a house. We use the model to decompose...

The Blue Economy in Africa, with its extensive aquatic and marine resources, is expected to play a major role in the continent's climate adaptation. It presents distinct opportunities to generate jobs and encourage economic growth while addressing the concerns of food security and climate...

The experimental literature on preferences for redistribution has established that individual perceptions of what earning distributions are fair depend greatly on context. In this paper, we study an important and novel dimension of context: whether the choice to redistribute occurs before...

Firms' success depends on their ability to deal with formal institutional quality. Specifically, firms exposed to a diversified set of institutional profiles can achieve institutional competitive advantage that provides firms with diverse knowledge and broader learning opportunities. While prior...