Shareholders in corporations face two very different types of governance problems: expropriation by controlling shareholders or managers; and expropriation by greedy rulers or, more generally, by the state. The problem is that the more successful investors are protecting their capital from the...

Although we cannot conceive of processes of economic growth that do not involve institutional change, in this essay we outline some reasons why one should be cautious about grounding a theory of growth on institutions. We emphasize how very different institutional structures have often been...