This paper introduces quality of government rather than regime type as dependent variable in studies of the political effects of natural resources. It consists of two parts. First, it theorizes the role of fiscal dependency of oil and gas rents in relation to three different dimensions of...

In this study, a number of factors have been considered as potential determinants of institutional quality in Sub- Saharan African countries. The empirical analysis has shown that historical factors such as state legitimacy determine the quality of current institutions in the region. Foreign aid...

The use of institutional measures in empirical work is widespread, but the question of what these measures actually capture and how they are constructed is something that is not given enough attention. Institutions and their measures are therefore like a “black box of goodies”: Something...

Natural disasters have been linked to both violent conflict and, in some settings, poor economic growth, but do they also drive government parties out of office? We study gov- ernment turnover in a global sample of more than 200 elections to the executive. Natural disasters are associated with...

Since its first appearance in the late 1800s, the origins of the Sicilian mafia have remained a largely unresolved mystery. Both institutional and historical explanations have been proposed in the literature through the years. In this paper, we develop an argument for a market structure...

Consider time series output data for two sectors, industry and agriculture. By examining just the output data themselves, what can we say about the relative impact of institutional/policy factors, intrasectoral competition for resources, and intersectoral linkages on each sector’s growth?...

We show that the asymptotic distribution of the ordinary least squares estimator in a cointegration regression may be bimodal. A simple case arises when the intercept is erroneously omitted from the estimated model or in nonlinear-in-variables models with endogenous regressors. In the latter...

All since the rise of the first civilizations, economic development has been closely intertwined with the evolution of states. In this paper, we contribute to the literature on state history and long-run economic development in four ways. First, we extend and complete the state history index...

http://hdl.handle.net/2077/32052 While it is widely believed that regions which experienced a transition to Neolithic agriculture early also become institutionally and conomically more advanced, many indicators suggest that within the Western agricultural core (including Europe, North Africa,...

New estimates of commodity output and patenting are used to explore New Zealand’s transition from extensive to intensive growth. By investigating the cointegrating and causal relationships among the output of 25 industries we show that a small number of common trends shaped the contours...