In this paper we provide a political game where agents decide whether to become legislators or politicians. Legislators determine the political institutions constraining politicians’ behavior and politicians compete for gaining the power to make decisions about the level of the public good. We derive the following results: i) Political competition is a necessary but not a sufficient condition f...

This paper develops the empirical and theoretical case that differences in economic institutions are the fundamental cause of differences in economic development. We first document the empirical importance of institutions by focusing on two "quasi-natural experiments" in history, the division of Korea into two parts with very different economic institutions and the colonization of much of the w...

The area of natural forest in Iran is approximately 12.4 million hectares, comprising 7.5%  of the total area of Iran. Forest management in the country was changed to the legislature after order of the Forest Nationalization Law in 1963. With  civilization development, pressure on forests was significantly increased. In the early  20th century a system of development planning began as a series ...

Canada’s immigration system is currently undergoing significant change driven by several goals that include: (1) a desire to improve the economic outcomes of entering immigrants, given the deterioration in labour market outcomes over the past several decades; (2) an attempt to better respond to short-term regional labour market shortages often associated with commodity booms, and (3) a desire t...

The notion of political consumption has two implications: First, consumers wield some kind of power that they can use to effect social change through the marketplace. Second, political consumption refers to and somehow combines the rationalities of two subsystems, politics and the economy. Yet regarding their everyday, highly individualized shopping decisions, consumers do not appear to command...