The paper tries to improve our understanding on the role of institutions in development by critically examining the current orthodox discourse on institutions and highlighting some of its key problems. After discussing some definitional problems, the chapter examines a number of problems in the...

We investigate how Reconstruction affected Black political participation and socio-economic advancement after the American Civil War. We use the location of federal troops and Freedmen's Bureau offices to indicate more intensive federal enforcement of civil rights. We find greater political...

Does culture have a causal effect on economic development? The data on European regions suggest that it does. Culture is measured by indicators of individual values and beliefs, such as trust and respect for others, and confidence in individual self-determination. To isolate the exogenous...

Der vorliegende Artikel führt die wirtschaftlichen Erfolge Sachsens nach der Vereinigung im Wesentlichen auf zwei Ursachen zurück: Zum einen auf die lange historische Tradition als bedeutsamer Industriestandort, die nicht zuletzt auch Denken und Einstellungen der Menschen in Sachsen auf lange...

Economic behavior strives for efficiency. Therefore, also evolving network structures should be a result of such a goal-oriented behavior. Traditionally, networks were assumed to be only temporary phenomena, since the prevailing organizational forms that comply with the efficiency postulate are...

An evolutionary perspective on economic behavior has to account for the influences that the human genetic endowment has on the choices the agents make. Likely to have been fixed in times of fierce selection pressure, this endowment is presumably adapted to the living conditions of early humans....

This paper presents a formal model in which differential satiation dynamics of various consumer needs translate into long-run changes of consumer behavior when income rises. In the model individuals allocate their income to the consumption categories proportional to need deprivation states...

China's transition to a market economy has been a process of basic institutional changes and institution building. The institutional change from a socialist labour regime (SLR) as one of the backbones upholding the traditional leninist system to a new 'socialist' market labour regime (SMLR)...

This paper argues that openness to goods trade in combination with an unequal distribution of political power has been a major determinant of the comparatively slow development of resource- or land-abundant regions like South America and the Caribbean in the nineteenth century. We develop a...