There is a broad agreement that political and economic institutions matter for long-term development. Yet relatively little is known as to how to adopt good quality institutions and reform weak or poor institutions, for which one needs to know how institutions change. This paper provides a...

This paper surveys the theoretical and empirical literature on the effect of economic and political inequality on institutions. The current understanding suggests that unequal societies develop exploitative and inefficient institutions. Empirical research - which is scant, and has mainly...

This paper examines the institutional and political determinants of the timing of growth episodes. We extend the earlier literature on the determinants of the onset of growth accelerations and decelerations by providing a more generalised approach to understanding growth episode transitions. We...