general public. Contrary to common perception, your typical academic economist does not believe that only money matters, and self-interest is not equivalent to selfishness. People are as likely to be altruistic as venal, and in day-to-day life, they are probably more likely to exhibit kindness than viciousness. Yet it is always wise to bear in mind that self-interest, even of the more enlighten...

The attraction of blue-chip listings in emerging stock markets is a major policy initiative common across much of the developing world. In many cases however, local blue-chip firms are the result of foreign Multinational Enterprise (MNE) firms engaging with local indigenous partners to form an international joint venture (IJV). These are unique with bilateral governance structures underscoring ...

Using the newly expanded set of 41 social tables from pre-modern societies, the paper tries to find out the factors associated with the level of inequality and the inequality extraction ratio (how close to the maximum inequality have the elites pushed the actual inequality). We find strong evidence that elites in colonies were more extractive, and that more densely populated and less urbanized ...

When Mao died in 1976, Russia appeared better poised than China to become an important commerical and industrial power in the global economy. Yet it is China rather than Russia that has embraced globalization and developed trade and manufacturing, exporting increasingly higher-value-added goods. The explanation for this surprising outcome in found is Chinese elites viewing globalization as thei...