In "Evaluating Recipes for Development Success" Avinash Dixit criticizes recent efforts to identify the "fundamental" causes of development and to distill policy recommendations from these efforts. This comment focuses on the strand of that literature related to institutions and development. Two...

Voting is a common feature of most firms. Unrestricted voting, however, can lead to unstable decision-making. The authors find that firms make trade-offs among collective decision-making, production scale, firm structure, and voter characteristics that are consistent with efforts to economize on...

Early neoclassical analyses predicted that poor countries would grow faster than wealthy countries because of technological advances and diminishing returns to capital in the latter. The reverse has occurred: poor countries are falling back rather than catching up. The authors suggest here that...

A large body of research has provided significant insights into the financial and macroeconomic causes of banking crises. Many of these causes - ranging from lapses in financial regulation to determined efforts to maintain a fixed exchange rate - have in common their origins as policy decisions...

The incentives of politicians to provide broad public goods and reduce poverty vary across countries. Even in democracies, politicians often have incentives to divert resources to political rents and private transfers that benefit a few citizens at the expense of many. These distortions can be...

This paper presents evidence that 'social capital' matters for measurable economic performance, using indicators of trust and civic norms from the World Values Survey for a sample of twenty-nine market economies. Membership in formal groups--Putnam's measure of social capital--is not associated...

We show that public investment is dramatically higher in countries with low-quality governance and limited political checks and balances or no competitive elections. This result is robust to a number of specifications. The most plausible interpretation of these results is that these governments...

In this article, we argue that the effectiveness of central bank independence and exchange-rate pegs in solving credibility problems is contingent on two factors: political institutions and information asymmetries. However, the impact of these two factors differs. We argue that the presence of...