We examine how local political corruption affects firm innovation in the United States. We find that firms located in more corrupt districts are less innovative, as measured by their patenting activities. We identify two possible economic channels through which corruption may affect innovation: a disincentive effect and a culture effect. We show that the negative impact of corruption on innovat...

This chapter surveys the new institutional economics, a rapidly growing literature combining economics, law, organization theory, political science, sociology and anthropology to understand social, political and commercial institutions. This literature tries to explain what institutions are, how they arise, what purposes they serve, how they change and how they may be reformed. Following conven...

This paper examines the elements of institutional development critical to the enhancement of company performance in transition economies. This includes initial conditions, forms of privatization, institutional frameworks and the competitiveness of markets. Comparing empirical evidence, the paper concludes that there is a clear distinction in effectiveness of policies followed and their impact b...

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...

Several political and economic factors are involved in choosing exchange rate policy in Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) countries. In the present study, these factors  have been investigated with an emphasis on OCA and political economic factors during 1990 -2014. The result shows that OCA and political economic factors as well as tradable sector are influential on exchange rate poli...

The Eubank (2012, JDS) findings on taxation, political accountability and foreign aid has had an important influence in academic and policy-making debates. Eubank has warned that his findings should not be generalized across Africa until they are backed by robust empirical evidence. This paper puts some empirical structure to the celebrated literature. The empirical evidence which is based on d...

We construct a political equilibrium in which employers and labour unions bargain over labour contracts, wage-earners and profit-earners lobby the government for taxation and labour market regulation, and labour market legislation must be accepted by the majority of voters. We show that the voters rule out profit sharing, because otherwise the government would capture all the gain. Furthermore,...

The interaction between: (i) political constraints, in part based on notions of “nation building,” and independence; (ii) the development of a suitable legal and regulatory environment; and (iii) economic constraints such as a growing state budget deficit and a recent banking crisis, are the subject of this paper. The paper will review and discuss the main political economy and competition issu...

We consider one-to-one matching (roommate) problems in which agents (students) can either be matched as pairs or remain single. The aim of this paper is twofold. First, we review a key result for roommate problems (the “lonely wolf” theorem) for which we provide a concise and elementary proof. Second, and related to the title of this paper, we show how the often incompatible concepts of stabili...

This paper studies the role of US political factors in the allocation of World Bank concessional lending, where US political interests are proxied by voting similarity in the United Nations General Assembly on issues identified as important by the US Department of State. In contrast to previous studies we find that the US exerted a significant influence on IDA lending during the period 1993 200...