I characterize modern social scientific studies of the state as comprising three generations: society centered, state centered, and the state-in-society approach. I then discuss how recent books by James Scott, David Stasavage, and Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson advance the literature by...

I conduct an event study of an exogenous pollution shock – smog in the winter of 2013 – to examine how the market values of firms in polluting industries and environmental protecting industries, respectively, responded in “the world’s worst polluter:” China. I first show that...