“Once one starts to think about” economic growth, “it is hard to think about anything else.” Those words, from the late economist Robert Lucas, explain why we’re so fascinated by international ...

Two MIT economists were among those awarded the Nobel Prize in economics Monday for their decades of work illuminating the relationship between political institutions and economic prosperity.

The left and right don’t agree on much, but many on both sides do agree on one thing: the system is broken. Over the past decade, anti-system political movements have surged, from Brexit in 2015 to ...

Democracies worldwide are suffering from legitimacy problems. This is reflected in low levels of public trust in key political institutions, the polarisation of politics, and the erosion of public ...

A new working paper from Nobel laureate James A. Robinson finds a vast landscape of 45,000 polities—deliberately fragmented to protect local autonomy Pre-colonial African societies have long been seen ...