This paper assesses how to quantitatively classify countries as conforming to the ideal of an “open access order” in the spirit of Douglass North, John Joseph Wallis, and Barry Weingast’s Violence and Social Orders. It does so by taking the harmonic mean of already existing measures of...

Competition is widely seen as a driver of improvements in institutional quality. We consider the robustness of competition, namely, polycentricity, in the form of the creation of institutions built by rebel groups in the course of civil war. In a variety of panel regressions and synthetic...