Abstract We examine how political institutions influence health expenditure by using a panel of 151 developing and developed countries for the years 2000 to 2015 four measures democracy. Our pooled OLS analysis shows that democracies have 20–30% higher government relative GDP than their autocratic counterparts. An instrumental variable approach which exploits regional diffusion democracy confir...

Hobbes to Rousseau: Inequality, Institutions, and Development This paper studies the endogenous evolution of economic and political institutions and the interdependencies with the process of economic development. Favorable economic institutions in form of a social contract that ensures a state of law and the absence of societal conflict are not assumed exogenously under certain political system...

We analyze how a country’s political institutions affect oil production within its borders. We find a pronounced negative relationship between political openness and volatility in oil production, with democratic regimes exhibiting less volatility than more autocratic regimes. This relationship holds across a number of robustness checks including using different measures of political conditions,...

We study the determinants of international migration with special attention to the role of institutional factors other than economic and demographic fundamentals. We evaluate the impact of political institutions and of those institutions specifically targeted at attracting migrants. For a dataset on 19th century migration, we find that economic and demographic differentials play a major role, b...

Conventional models of ‘transitions to democracy’ are incomplete and insufficient for the analysis of the regime changes in Russia and other post-Soviet societies, which go beyond the usual textbook cases. This article reconsiders conceptual frameworks for the analysis of democracy and democratization in the light of the experience of postSoviet political developments. The distinction between t...

This paper argues that the benefits of international institutions accrue disproportionately to pairs of states that find cooperation most difficult. It determines which states achieve the greatest gains from these institutions by identifying a central reason that states fail to cooperate in international relations: they fear being “held up” by other states for political concessions. Political h...

the formulation of global health policy is political; and all institutions operating in the global health landscape are political. this is because policies and institutions inevitably represent certain values, reflect particular ideologies, and preferentially serve some interests over others. this may be expressed explicitly and consciously; or implicitly and unconsciously. but it’s important t...

This chapter considers the role of economic and political institutions in the formation of local public policies. The chapter has three objectives. First, to synthesize the dominant models of local policy formation with mobile households, with particular emphasis on the objectives that are attributed to the institutions that provide collective goods. Second, to describe and model local politica...