This research argues that variations in the interplay between cultural assimilation and cultural diffusion have played a significant role in giving rise to differential patterns of economic development across the globe. Societies that were geographically less vulnerable to cultural diffusion...

Boom and Bust: Local strategy for big events is the result of a collective effort at the University of Alberta to better understand the dramatic ups and downs which too often characterize western Canadian communities. From the Canadian analysis stems this book, which can be helpful in any...

The aim of this article is to enrich the vision regarding the connection between entrepreneurship and economic growth, focusing upon an economy in transition to a market economy. The authors of the present paper have developed an empirical model – based on a constant preoccupation to observe...

Insufficient competitiveness of small and medium enterprises in Serbia can be significantly improved by a system of business associations through clusters, business incubators and technology parks. This connection contributes to the growth and development of not only the cluster members, but has...

We study the long-term economic legacy of highly-skilled minorities a century after their wholesale expulsion. Using mass expulsions of Armenian and Greek communities of the Ottoman Empire in the early 20th century as a unique natural experiment of history, we show that districts with greater...

Institutions are important for proper economic performance, but are replaceable by trust or other social norms. We show that when proper institutions and trust are missing, integrity of the individuals can replace them. We construct a model of a transactions-based economy with contracts...

We study the connection between economic performance and the quality of government institutions for the sample of 103 Italian NUTS3 regions, including new measures of institutional quality calculated using data on the provision of four areas of public service: health, educational...

The concepts social innovation and social entrepreneurship have gained considerable attention both in different fields of academic research and in the context of the development of economic and social policies. However, despite its wide-spread use there does not exist a unique or at least widely...

This paper does three things. First, based on a limited number of theoretically established dimensions, it proposes a new de facto indicator for the rule of law. It is the first such indicator to take the quality of legal norms explicitly into account. Second, using this indicator we shed new...

We claim that a sequential mechanism linking history to development exists: first, history defines the quality of social capital; then, social capital determines the level of corruption; finally, corruption affects economic performance. We test this hypothesis on a dataset of Italian provinces,...