The governance of infrastructure institutions in the financial markets – namely exchanges, central counter-parties (CCPs), and central securities depositories (CSDs) – has become a matter of significant commercial, regulatory, legislative, and even political concern. Such institutions play a...

Using firm-level balance-sheet data comparable across EU countries, we consider firms active in generation, distribution and transmission of electricity and their ownership structure to empirically investigate the interaction of public versus private ownership and the quality of institutions as...

Economic theory contains a significant theoretical antinomy. Markets are thought to secure coordination in self-organized fashion. In contrast, polities are portrayed as securing coordination through planning and administration. Doing this is to commit what Mitchel Resnick (1994) calls the...

The French privatizations program is one of the principal programs worldwide regarding the volume of equity issues. A reading of the privatization process through the corporate governance theory resulted in the development of a model allowing to take into account, on the one hand, the temporal...

This paper demonstrates that a structurally derived, internationally comparable index of checks and balances on executive discretion created by variation in political structures and party systems affects relative rates of basic telecommunications infrastructure deployment in 147 countries during...

Faster courts favor economic development in States with sufficiently constrained executive power, whereas they harm development in States where political power is relatively unconstrained. We document this novel pattern across developing countries, and build a simple model of the State as a...

New theoretical approaches to the state have posed challenges for the comparative analysis of the organizational features of states. The analysis of state bodies and state agencies has largely been confined to the sub-discipline of public administration, and has been resistant to the systematic...

This study investigates the effect of participative political institutions (PPIs) that emerged in many central European cities from the late 13th century. The empirical analysis of the paper is based on newly compiled long-run data for the existence of different types of PPIs in 104 cities in...

One frequently given explanation for why autocrats maintain corrupt and inefficient institutions is that the autocrats benefit personally even though the citizens of their countries are worse off. The empirical evidence does not support this hypothesis. Autocrats in countries with low-quality...

There has been a steady increase in the size of state, defined as the share of total government expenditure to gross domestic product, over time. Although there are many factors affecting the size of state, institutional quality is also expected to have an effect on the size of state in recent...