Faster courts favor economic development in States with sufficiently constrained executive power, whereas they harm development in States where political power is relatively unconstrained. We document this novel pattern across developing countries, and build a simple model of the State as a...

We build a simple model of legal dualism in which a pro-poor legal reform, under certain conditions, causes the conflicting custom to go some way toward producing the change intended by the legislator. It then acts as an "outside anchor" that exerts a "magnet effect" on the custom. We illustrate...

This paper systematically reviews the empirical literature on development non‐governmental organizations (NGOs), drawing both on quantitative and qualitative analyses, and constructs a set of basic facts about these organizations. These facts concern the size of the development NGO sector and...

This chapter tries to synthesize the progress that economists have made towards understanding various aspects of the role of religion in human societies from a development economics perspective. We start by reviewing the contributions that consider religious beliefs as exogenously given and try...

This article reviews some of the recent literature on the relationship between the legal system and economic development. We also look at the historical, socio-cultural, and political factors that explain the differences in the characteristics of legal systems across countries and thus affect...