We present a simple model, illustrating how democracy may improve the quality of the economic institutions. The model further suggests that institutional quality varies more across autocracies than across democracy and that the positive effect of democracies on economic institutional quality...

We compile biographical information on more than 5,000 Prussian politicians and exploit newly digitized administrative data to examine whether landowning and landless elites differ in the extent to which they support health infrastructure projects. Using exogenous variation in soil texture, we...

This short article contributes to the Elgar Encyclopedia of Public Choice by summarizing the literature on the measurement of democracy. I proceed in two step. In the first part, I describe the classical approach for producing a measure of democracy and sketch an alternative approach. The second...