This paper investigates the worldwide phenomenon of "political divergence'' between the East and the West. During the 8th to 10th centuries, Western Europe and China both achieved political stability, but they did so through dramatically different routes. Western Europe developed parliamentary...

We exploit a unique dataset of country-specific military expenditures and construct a proxy for international instability, measured as the growth of the global military expenditure to GDP ratio, to capture political tensions and international conflicts. Using the market indices of 44 countries,...

This paper provides insights on the sustainability of economic development from a historical and political economy perspective. We demonstrate that China's rural financial policy in the 1980s was quite liberal in employing market mechanisms, supporting entrepreneurship, and encouraging...

This paper provides an exhaustive analysis of the key factors that led to rising global energy demand, based on an OECD sample and a non-OECD sample over the period of 1980-2009. In addition to income and price elasticities traditionally examined, this research takes into account the effects of...