This paper develops a dynamic framework to analyze the political sustainability of economic reforms in developing countries. First, we demonstrate that economic reforms that are proceeding successfully may run into a political impasse, with the reform’s initial success having a negative impact...

Individual leaders have been central to the transformation of political institutions, organizations and many instances of social and economic reform. Why are some leaders able to take advantage of opportunities to successfully catalyze large-scale change while others fail? In this paper we argue...

We analyze whether or not the globalization of capital, ‘disciplines’ governments and improves governance. We demonstrate that globalization affects governance, by increasing a country’s vulnerability to sudden capital flight. This increased threat of capital flight can discipline...

This paper examines the role of cultural factors in driving the politics and shape of migration policy. We show that there exists a broad political failure that results in inefficiently high barriers restricting the import of temporary foreign workers and also admitting an inefficiently large...

We explore the link between portfolio home bias and consumption risk sharing among Italian regions using aggregated household level information on consumption, income and portfolio holdings. We propose to use data on equity fund ownership to proxy for regional home bias: equity funds are...

This paper provides an empirical analysis of the effects of new product versus process innovations on export propensity at the firm level. Product innovation is a key factor for successful market entry in models of creative destruction and Schumpeterian growth. Process innovation helps securing...

This paper combines representative worker-level data that cover time-varying job-level task characteristics of an economy over a long time span with sector-level bilateral trade data for merchandize and services. We carefully create longitudinally consistent workplace characteristics from the...

The interplay between religion and the economy has occupied social scientists for long. We construct a unique panel of income and Protestant church attendance for six waves of up to 175 Prussian counties spanning 1886-1911. The data reveal a marked decline in church attendance coinciding with...

This paper provides a documentation of the ifo Prussian Economic History Database (iPEHD), a county-level database covering a rich collection of variables for 19th-century Prussia. The Royal Prussian Statistical Office collected these data in several censuses over the years 1816-1901, with much...

Why did substantial parts of Europe abandon the institutionalized churches around 1900? Empirical studies using modern data mostly contradict the traditional view that education was a leading source of the seismic social phenomenon of secularization. We construct a unique panel dataset of...