This paper highlights scholarly neglect of political legitimacy, the idea of a state's use of power in ways acceptable to its citizens. We argue that political legitimacy affects a state's ability to formulate and implement its policies, thus affecting governance. Our paper provides the first empirical evidence of the positive relationship between political legitimacy and governance. We combine novel cross-sectional data on political legitimacy and several governance indicators from 66 countries. Our results show that a one-standard-deviation increase in the legitimacy score increases the rule of law indicator by about one-third standard deviation. These results are robust across OLS, an instrumental variable method, and several other governance indicators. Moreover, our results reveal that in the presence of greater trust, political legitimacy has an enhanced impact on governance.

We are now close to reaching what climate scientists advise is a ‘tipping point’ when the injuries we have visited on the planet will become self-reinforcing and produce an ecosystem that is alien to human life. The mal-distribution of consumption within and between nations is a major reason why there is little agreement on appropriate remedial action. Ensuring planetary survival while reducing inequity is made the more difficult, because the richest one-seventh of the world’s population has already reached consumption levels beyond the capacity of the planetary ecosystem to accommodate it.

The philosophical debate concerning political exchange has largely been confined to debating the desirability of vote trading; where individuals can sell their votes or buy votes from others. However, I show that the vote credit systems prevalent in public choice theory entirely avoid the common objections to political exchange that afflict vote trading proposals. Namely, vote credit systems avoid equality concerns and inalienability concerns. I offer an alternative critique to formal mechanisms that encourage political exchange by drawing on the role that impartiality and impartial moral judgements play in democratic and electoral institutions.

The paper examines doctrinal and political reasons to explain why the Ancient Greek religion did not feature a distinct class of professional priests as suppliers of religious goods. Doctrinal reasons relate to worshiping a multitude of powerful anthropomorphic gods with flawed characters; absence of a founder of religion and of a scripture; lack of religious doctrine and of a code of moral behaviour and piety manifested as mass participation in rituals. These factors denied religious suppliers the opportunity to form a monopoly acting as an autonomous intermediary between humans and gods. Political reasons relate to the supremacy of the demos which watchfully guarded its decision-making powers and prevented other actors like a priestly interest group to challenge its authority.

Several existing studies have documented a negative relationship between firm financial constraint and export activities but do not attempt to examine factors that could attenuate this relationship in Africa. In this paper, we examine the effect of financial constraint on exports in Africa and explore how the level of trust in countries where firms are located shapes this relationship. We combine the World Bank Enterprise Surveys with different measures of country-level personal and interpersonal trust computed from the Afrobarometer surveys of 19 African countries. Our results show that financial constraints negatively affect export activities. However, this negative effect is attenuated for firms that are located in trust-intensive societies. These findings are robust to different specifications. Interestingly, we find that small and medium-sized enterprises in Africa are more likely to be affected by financial constraints but also more likely to benefit from a higher level of both personal and interpersonal trust, while for larger firms only interpersonal trust matters.

This paper studies the spatial deployment of temporary settlements in Extremadura in 1932-1933 and 1936. The literature has stressed the role of bottom-up forces driving settlements in 1933 and 1936, perhaps making land reform in Extremadura an interesting case study of local collective action-driving policy implementation in a developing economy. Contrary to this view, we argue that there was an equal or more important role of the top-down, programmatic design of land occupations, which explains a large share of the spatial and temporal variation of expropriations and settlements.

The role of citizens' collective action for the emergence and consolidation of democracy is generally analysed within bottom-up theories. However, top-down theories show that elites might impede or promote both democracy and collective action through a set of strategies which are often unobserved and vary over time. Democratic persistence and change require then to be assessed in a dynamic framework which considers both citizens and elites' strategies. For such reason, on a large sample of countries in the period 1971–2014, we jointly estimate the probability of collective action and democracy using a Structural Dynamic Model. This allows us to account for the dynamic nature of the two political phenomena under investigation by controlling for their persistence, for initial conditions and time-varying unobserved heterogeneity. We find that collective action matters for the emergence of democracy but not for its consolidation which seems to be related to more structural economic factors.

With the aid of a lab experiment, we explored how imperfect monitoring and punishment networks impacted appropriation, punishment and beliefs in a common pool resource appropriation dilemma. We studied the differences between the complete network (with perfect monitoring and punishment, in which everyone can observe and punish everyone else) and two ‘imperfect’ networks (that systematically reduce the number of subjects who could monitor and punish others): the directed and undirected circle networks. We found that free riders were punished in all treatments, but the network topology impacted the type of punishment: the undirected circle induced more severe punishment and prosocial punishment compared to the other two networks. Both imperfect networks were more efficient because the larger punishment capacity available in the complete network elicited higher punishment amount.

The British people voted for Brexit for a variety of reasons. A literature is emerging that seeks to explain the outcome using the increasing amount of aggregate and individual data being generated. Less often considered is the impact those factors that shaped the referendum outcome might continue to exert on the debate about the UK's future relationship with the EU. We argue that they will continue to weigh on political debates. The continued resonance of the Leave message militates against anything but what has come to be known as a ‘hard Brexit’.

The aim of this paper is to evaluate to what extent more transparency can reduce the occurrence of speculative attacks. It proposes a survey of the literature about the pros and cons of transparency on the exchange rate market, which is one of the main pillars of the new international financial architecture. The effects of transparency are shown to be ambiguous both from a theoretical and empirical point of views. However, the imperfect connection resulting from the confrontation between theory and empirics suggests that some new insights are necessary in order to better catch stylised facts on the one hand and to better evaluate the theory on the other, as has been done in recent literature. This leads to new proposals for economic and informational policies.

Dans cet article, nous formalisons deux critères de décisions qui tentent de rendre compte de deux logiques différentes d'interprétation du Principe de précaution. Le premier critère correspond à la maximisation du minimum de l'espérance d'utilité alors que le second critère correspond à la minimisation du maximum de l'espérance de regret. Les deux critères de décisions sont appliqués à un problème économique où l'incertitude est mesurée par une famille de probabilités. Nous montrons qu'il existe un intervalle de probabilités sur lequel les choix relatifs aux deux critères divergent. Plus particulièrement, nous montrons que sur cet intervalle, le second critère à la différence du premier, conduit toujours à retenir la décision la plus précautionneuse, les décisions étant identiques sur les autres intervalles.