To what degree and why are traditional institutions persistent? Following up the literature on the long-term effects of precolonial institutions in Africa, we investigate whether and where today's traditional institutions mirror their precolonial predecessors. We do so by linking data on contemporary traditional institutions of African ethnic groups with Murdock's historical Ethnographic Atlas. We find a robust association between past and present levels of institutional complexity, differentiating between institutions’ political centralization and functional differentiation. However, this persistence originates almost exclusively from former British colonies governed with more reliance on precolonial institutions than other colonies, in particular French ones. These findings contribute to research on the development and effects of traditional institutions, highlighting the need to account for varying persistence of traditional institutions.

Borrowed capacity builds upon institutional capacity scholarship to discuss how interactions between government agencies and interest groups can increase agency resources and scope during agency formation and development. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission scholars often note the lack of capacity to implement Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 during the first years of the agency. I argue that current assessments of the agency’s capacity between 1965 and 1968 are incomplete by expanding the definition of capacity to include borrowed and nontraditional forms of capacity, reviewing congressional allocations to the agency and agency budgets, and considering the active roles state and local agencies as well as interest groups played in the early implementation of Title VII. I demonstrate the agency amassed not only claims but also capacity during its early years.

Since a peace treaty in 2016, Colombia has faced a significant challenge to reduce poverty and strengthen its institutions. A few studies have analyzed the relationship between institutions and subjective poverty, but none has demonstrated this influence in the Colombian context at a municipal level. This article estimated a logit regression including a cluster effect to evidence the influence of municipal institutions over perceptions of poverty by the inhabitants of twelve main cities in Colombia in 2016. Findings include that having a better rule of law and fiscal performance, reducing political fragmentation to have better governance, guaranteeing property rights, fostering the benefits of metropolitan areas, and improving citizen participation reduce the probability of feeling poor.

This article analyses trends in the development of the stock exchange in Jakarta between its stepwise institutionalisation since 1898 and its closure in 1942. The article contributes to literature on the significance of stock markets in the process of mobilising external capital for investment by private enterprise in emerging economies. It finds that the brokers participating in the stock exchange traded shares and bonds of companies operating in Indonesia and registered in Indonesia or in the Netherlands. Many of these securities were also traded on the much larger stock exchange in Amsterdam. Although formally independent, both securities markets were integrated. Based on estimates of relatively high market capitalisation during 1901–40, the article concludes that the Jakarta and Amsterdam stock exchanges together contributed significantly to the mobilisation of private investment and the development of private enterprise in Indonesia.

This is the second of two papers that generate and analyze quantitative estimates of the development of English caselaw and associated legal ideas before the Industrial Revolution. In the first paper, we estimated a 100-topic structural topic model, named the topics, and showed how to interpret topic-prevalence timelines. Here, we provide examples of new insights that can be gained from these estimates. We first provide a bird's-eye view, aggregating the topics into 15 themes. Procedure is the highest-prevalence theme, but by the mid-18th century attention to procedure decreases sharply, indicating solidification of court institutions. Important ideas on real-property were substantially settled by the mid-17th century and on contracts and torts by the mid-18th century. Thus, crucial elements of caselaw developed before the Industrial Revolution. We then examine the legal ideas associated with England's financial revolution. Many new legal ideas relevant to finance were well accepted before the Glorious Revolution. Finally, we examine the sources of law used in the courts. Emphasis on precedent-based reasoning increases by 1650, but diffusion was gradual, with pertinent ideas solidifying only after 1700. Ideas on statute applicability were accepted by the mid-16th century but debates on legislative intent were still occurring in 1750.

The history of England's institutions has long informed research on comparative economic development. Yet to date, there exists no quantitative evidence on a core aspect of England's institutional evolution, that embodied in the accumulated decisions of English courts. Focusing on the two centuries before the Industrial Revolution, we generate and analyze the first quantitative estimates of the development of English caselaw and its associated legal ideas. We achieve this in two companion papers. In this, the first of the pair, we build a comprehensive corpus of 52,949 reports of cases heard in England's high courts before 1765. Estimating a 100-topic structural topic model, we name and interpret all topics, each of which reflects a distinctive aspect of English legal thought. We produce time series of the estimated topic prevalences. To interpret the topic timelines, we develop a tractable model of the evolution of legal-cultural ideas and their prominence in case reports. In the companion paper, we will illustrate with multiple applications the usefulness of the large amount of new information generated by our approach.

Private regulation often entails competition among multiple rule-makers, but private rules and regulators do not always compete. For substantial parts of the global economy, a single private body (per issue) is recognized as the focal point for global rule-making. The selection of the institutional setting here effectively takes place prior to drawing up the specific rules, with important consequences for the politics of regulating global markets. In this paper, I develop a theoretical explanation for how a private transnational organization may attain such preeminence—how it can become the focal point for rule-making—in its area of expertise. I emphasize the transnational body's capacity to pursue its organizational self-interest, as well as timing and sequence. I then examine empirically a particularly important body of this kind, which today is essentially uncontested as the focal point for private regulation in its area, even though its standards often have substantial distributive implications: the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC). I analyze the persistence and changes in the IEC's formal rules or procedures and informal norms, as well as the broadening scope of its regulatory authority and membership over more than a century.