While entrepreneurs benefit from unrestricted free entry into markets, they have a time-inconsistent incentive to lobby for government entry restrictions once they become successful. Bad political institutions yield to these demands, and growing barriers are placed on domestic and international...

Previous literature generally finds that greater fiscal decentralization is associated with faster economic growth, improved government performance, and stronger constraints on the Leviathan behavior of governments. Because economic growth critically depends on the presence of good government...

The special interest group model of government, employed throughout public choice theory, models the outcomes of government as a function of special interest group activity. Early work in this area by authors such as Stigler (1971) and Peltzman (1976) focused on the role of interest groups in...

While it is now well-established in the literature that countries with better policies and institutions, as measured by the Economic Freedom of the World (EFW) index, have better outcomes in terms of prosperity, growth, and measures of human well-being. However, we know little about the process...

While technology entrepreneurship has been widely recognized as a driver of economic growth, there exists little in the way of a unified framework for understanding technology entrepreneurship and assessing its value proposition, particularly when network externalities and information are...

In the economic development literature, cultural diversity (for example, ethnolinguistic fractionalization) has been shown to have a negative impact on economic outcomes in many underdeveloped countries. We hypothesize that the impact of diversity on economic performance depends on the quality...

Previous literature stresses the importance of free media for economic development. By its nature TV, radio, and newspapers cross borders allowing citizens to easily sample media from neighboring countries. This creates pressure for domestic reform and spreads media freedom between countries....