This paper presents a model of the agricultural producer price level as a function of a country's structure of agricultural trade and its protection of agriculture. In turn, the structure of a country's agricultural trade is a function of its resource endowment and its level of agricultural...

This paper makes two contributions to the literature. First, it introduces a new, easily accessed and objective measure of the enforceability of contracts and the security of property rights. Second, it uses this measure to provide additional and more direct evidence about the importance of...

We present and test empirically a new theory of property and contract rights. Any incentive an autocrat has to respect such rights comes from his interest in future tax collections and national income and increases with his planning horizon. We find a compelling empirical relationship between...

Economics has changed enormously since Professor Ha-Joon Chang burst onto the scene in the early 1990s. His critiques of mainstream economics are far more applicable to the discipline at that time than they are now. Whatever the shortcomings of the current literature on institutions and...

This article presents a statistical study of the determinants of democracy in the postwar period. Important variables are found to be former status as a British colony, island status, the share of the population professing Islam, the percentage of European descent, penteration of the English...

Review of: Understanding Democracy: Economic and Political Perspectives. Ed. by Albert Breton, Gianluigi Galeotti, Pierre Salmon, Ronald Wintrobe. 1997. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge