This paper provides a review and synthesis of the findings of the second phase of a research project on institutions and long-run economic performance. It discusses research findings in five areas, namely (1) the relationship between institutional characteristics and the duration of economic...

National framework conditions mediate the effect of technological capabilities of firms on their productivity. Although this has been recognized in the literature for a long time, a quantitative test that explicitly considers this hypothesis has been lacking. Using a World Bank datasets of about...

What is state capacity and how does it affect development? The concept of state capacity acquired centrality during the late seventies and eighties, sponsored by a rather compact set of scholarly works. It later permeated through several disciplines and has now earned a place within the many...

This paper investigates micro and macro determinants of firms' investment behaviour using firm data from 101 developing and emerging economies. A substantial number of firms in our sample does not invest in fixed capital or invests little relative to sales revenue. Using a multilevel probit...

This paper analyzes periods of economic stagnation in a panel of countries. We test if stagnation episodes are predicted by institutional factors and external/internal shocks, as is implied by recent theoretical contributions, and compare the impacts of these variables with those of traditional...

This paper defines economic slumps as a sequence of structural breaks exhibiting a specific pattern. We identify 58 such episodes between 1950 and 2008 among a large sample of countries, and then examine the phases of decline. In several countries declines last extremely long, and we suggest...

"Innovation is good for you" appears actually the common feature of most science, technology and innovation studies over the last decades. This appears, however surprising given the fact that innovation failure rather than innovation success appears a much more common feature. Hence the simple,...

The empirical literature on economic growth agrees that institutions and governance are important determinants of long-run economic growth rates. As a stylized fact, this literature points to a strong correlation between the level of GDP per capita and the general development level of...

It is well-known that the extent of credit lent to private agents differs widely between countries. The `financial deepening' of the economy offers opportunities as well as financial risks. This study investigates the extent to which institutional characteristics are re- lated to countries'...