Almost half of the world's states provide bilateral development assistance. While previous research takes the set of donor countries as exogenous, this article introduces a new dataset on aid giving covering all countries in the world, both rich and...

Data shows that populist and non-populist governments implemented similar policies to contain the pandemic. Non-populist governments see stronger inc

On average, populist governments record significantly lower increases in popularity in the Corona crisis than non-populist ones, even though they usually introduced similar policies to contain the pandemic. At the same time, however, populists are...

Almost half of the world’s states provide bilateral development assistance. While previous research takes the set of donor countries as exogenous, this article is the first to explore the determinants of aid donorship. We hypothesize that democratic...

Estimating two-step selection models, we find that more democratic governments are more likely to conclude preferential trade agreements (PTAs) and to agree to stricter investment provisions related to pre-establishment national treatment and...

The Grand Transition (GT) view claims that economic development is causal to institutional development, and that many institutional changes can be understood as transitions occurring at roughly the same level (zones) of development. The Primacy of...

The Grand Transition (GT) view claims that economic development is causal to institutional development, and that many institutional changes can be understood as transitions occurring at roughly the same level (zone) of development. The Primacy of...

The paper considers the transformation of the political system as countries pass through the Grand Transition from a poor developing country to a wealthy developed country. In the process most countries change from an authoritarian to a democratic...

Acemoglu, Johnson, Robinson, and Yared (2008) demonstrate that estimation of the standard adjustment model with country-fixed and time-fixed effects removes the statistical significance of income as a causal factor of democracy. We argue that their...

We consider the empirical relevance of two opposing hypotheses on the causality between income and democracy: The Democratic Transition claims that rising incomes cause a transition to democracy, whereas the Critical Junctures hypothesis denies this...