Using banking sector and stock market development indicators, we explore the importance of a wide range of institutional quality variables as sources of financial development. The empirical results based on the dynamic panel system GMM estimations demonstrate that a high-quality institutional...

Regulation is a way of intervention of the public sector, which uses its legitimate and coercive power to establish restrictions to agent’s activities who participate in the market and guarantee the efficient allocation of goods and services and social welfare. In Colombia, as an interesting...

We show that the character and the morality of citizens are important ingredients of economic growth because they go hand in hand with the great institutions of private property, democ-racy, and free markets. Our approach enables us to establish this result by reference to the structure and...

The theoretical model delves into the relationship between labor market institutions and unemployment by proving two propositions: (1) allowing informal activity bolsters job creation, and (2) if the institutional environment is initially, sufficiently, weak, then mitigating it will lower...

We revisit Greif's (1993) analysis of trade between the 11th-century Maghribi traders and present two different models which bring into play, in an essential way, historical features of the Maghribi's organization which had no role in Greif's own analysis. Our reformulation of the Maghribi's...

Long-term growth in developing countries has been explained in four frameworks: ‘extractive colonial institutions’ (Acemoglu et al., 2001), ‘colonial legal origin’ (La Porta et al., 2004) ‘geography’ (Gallup et al., 1998) and ‘colonial human capital’ (Glaeser et al., 2004). In...

We revisit earlier estimates of agricultural productivity in original Mercosur member countries and later associates: Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay, Chile, Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Venezuela, for 1972-2002. We estimate a translog frontier production function and revise our...

By comparing the development of landownership in China and England, this paper explores what were behind their different trajectories. In particular, I examined the delineation of property rights, alienation of land, rent and tax, inheritance and accumulation of land. Feudal England was a...

A well-established result in the theoretical literature on labour market flexibility is that the employment should be more volatile in "flexible" labour markets. Over the last 35 years, Italy gives a good example of a transition from an over-regulated labour market into a quite more flexible...

In this paper we examine the importance of institutional arrangements and factors related to the economic structure to explain inflation outcomes in Latin America. We perform a dynamic panel data analysis with an ample set of variables that allowed us to consider the temporal dimension of the...