Physical resources such as land, labour and livestock, and nonphysical resources such as indigenous knowledge and institutions of producers in the grain surplus and deficit regions of the Central Highlands of Ethiopia are examined under situation of environmental and policy risks. Frequency...

This paper uses cross-country data from 1965 to 2008 to examine how ethnic heterogeneity affects the probability of technological disasters. Estimation results showed that ethnic heterogeneity increased the probability of technological disasters.

Persistent institutions, which are captured by legal origin, are considered to influence the occurrence and intensity of economic crises. However, little is known about how changes in legal origin affect processes of economic development. Using non-European country data, this paper investigates...

The aim of the paper is to analyze how corruption contributes to the spread of shadow economy and damages viable economic development of any country. The unfreedoms that are created under the conditions of illegal transactions and corrupt practices considerably limit the opportunities of...

This chapter surveys the major contributions to the rapidly growing empirical literature on social capital and economic performance, focusing primarily on cross-country approaches. It first addresses characteristics of governments that fall under broad definitions of the term social capital. It...

In this paper, I merge two theories -- theory of "passionate individuals" by Gumilev(1989) and Memetics by Dawkins(1976) - to develop a formal growth theory that states that societies become more developed when their members have more intrinsic motivation to solve problems of social importance...

We set up a theoretical framework to analyze the possible role of economic growth and technical progress in the erosion of social capital. Under certain parameters, the relationship between technical progress and social capital can take the shape of an inverted U curve. We show the circumstances...

This paper critically reviews the current various measures of trust through surveys/questionnaires and trust experiments. The main shortcoming from such approaches is that the trust index produced from surveys and experiment are ambiguous. Given these arguments, I use Factor Analysis technique...

This research explores the historical roots and persistent effects of the division of labor in pre-modern societies. Exploiting a novel ethnic-level dataset, which combines geocoded ethnographic, linguistic and genetic data, it advances the hypothesis and establishes empirically that population...

This research explores the historical roots of the division of labor in pre-modern societies. It advances the hypothesis and establishes empirically that intra-ethnic diversity had a positive effect on the division of labor across ethnicities in the pre-modern era. Exploiting a variety of...