In this article, I investigate why it was so difficult for nineteenth-century Mexico to develop the institutions necessary for a modern state. Driven by regional warlords and bandits, the country suffered from persistent violence and disorder. Challenging geography and colonial legacies...

Douglass North once emphasized that development takes centuries, but he did not have a theory of how and why change occurs. This groundbreaking book advances such a theory by examining in detail why England and Spain developed so slowly from 1000 to 1800. A colonial legacy must go back centuries...

Exchange rate management is a salient macroeconomic issue, especially in developing countries. In this paper, we study political economy factors that may affect the real exchange rate (RER) process and the real economic effects of the RER. We review recent literature on the effects of elections...

We adapt the model of McGuire & Olson (1996), creating a rotating bandit model to investigate the economic effects of a polity consisting of a regularly changing autocrat with an encompassing interest but a finite time horizon. We apply our model by studying the relationship between electoral...

I examine 19th century Mexico for a better understanding of how and why it was so difficult to create the institutions of a modern state. I show that Mexico suffered from a vicious cycle in that period, something that is probably common to many developing countries, in that they needed a large...