We exploit historical differences in foral law to consistently estimate the contribution of the quality of enforcement institutions to economic specialization across Spanish provinces in the period 1999-2014. The distribution of economic activity in Spain as of today shows a strong pattern of...

In this paper, we revisit and examine the effect of political instability on institutional quality. To this end, we exploit the crackdown of government cabinet in 2008 that led to almost two decades of pervasive political instability using the unique case of Slovenia and estimate the average...

In this paper, we revisit the relationship between economic freedom and growth across 407 German districts (Kreise). We build six indicators of economic freedom and cluster them into categories reflecting tax rates and size of the government and public sector. Exploiting the variation in the...