Governments may also use religious soft power in pursuit of national interests and objectives. This article focuses on the role of religious soft power in the foreign policy of three states – the United States of America, India and the Islamic Republic of Iran. The main concern is to assess religious actors’ contribution to the foreign policy environment and agenda in each country. The idea of ...

The choice to give up sovereignty to another state helps explain the development of international hierarchy, while resistance often results in conflict as states instead use coercion to assert their control. This paper develops an explanation of why actors support giving up sovereignty to another state. The argument uses domestic politics to explain hierarchy, expanding beyond the existing lite...

This paper develops the empirical and theoretical case that differences in economic institutions are the fundamental cause of differences in economic development. We first document the empirical importance of institutions by focusing on two “quasi-natural experiments” in history, the division of Korea into two parts with very different economic institutions and the colonization of much of the w...

This publication may be reproduced for personal and educational use only. Commercial copying, hiring or lending of this publication is strictly prohibited. The Europe China Research and Advice Network (ECRAN) is a three-year project funded by the European Union to provide advice on China to European policy-makers. It aims to establish a wide network of experts and institutions across Europe who...

Immigrants and Religion Religious considerations affect the decision to immigrate as well as the choice of destination country, and religious behaviors change as immigrants adjust to the economic context of their new country. This paper considers the interaction between the Economics of Religion and the Economics of Immigration, and distinguishes between religiosity per se and an immigrant’s re...

We construct a model of simultaneous change and persistence in institutions. The model consists of landowning elites and workers, and the key economic decision concerns the form of economic institutions regulating the transaction of labor (e.g., competitive markets versus labor repression). The main idea is that equilibrium economic institutions are a result of the exercise of de jure and de fa...

Religions are organized in a variety of ways. They may resemble an elected autocracy, a parliamentary democracy, or something akin to a monarchy, where heredity plays a primary role. This variation allows for a comparative study of their organization. These differing power arrangements call for different types of strategic behavior in the fight for control over church doctrine and finance. And ...