This manuscript examines the rapid spread of pension privatization and the flat tax in former communist countries in order to understand why new policy ideas take hold and to better understand the role played by material resources in the diffusion of new policy ideas. Unlike previous...

Lustration is alternately theorized and anecdotally alleged to either undermine or contribute to the democratic transitions in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) by supporting or undermining trust in public institutions, and by extension trust in national government. Using quantitative data on...

Abstract: Cross-national surveys suggest that regulatory and policy uncertainty is an important constraint on investment in developing countries. Yet there has been little direct empirical investigation of the sources of this uncertainty. This paper presents evidence of an inverted U-shaped...