Showing results 1 - 10 of 10
| James Robinson
Understanding and improving the one and three times GDP per capita cost-effectiveness thresholds. James Robinson, June 18, 2016, Paper, "Researchers and policymakers have long been interested in developing simple decision rules to aid in determining whether an intervention is, or is not, cost-effective. In global health, interventions that impose costs per disability-adjusted life year averted less than three and one times gross domestic product…
| James Robinson
The Rise and Decline of General Laws of Capitalism. James A. Robinson, January 2015, Paper. "Thomas Piketty's (2013) book, 'Capital in the 21st Century,' follows in the tradition of the great classical economists, like Marx and Ricardo, in formulating general laws of capitalism to diagnose and predict the dynamics of inequality. We argue that general economic laws are unhelpful as a guide to understanding the past or predicting the future…
| James Robinson
James Robinson: No 'simple recipe' for inclusive institutions in resource-rich poor nations. James Robinson, December 10, 2014, Video. "Harvard University professor James Robinson shares his thoughts on the process of building inclusive institutions for development. There is no silver bullet to building inclusive, effective and sustainable institutions in pursuit of development, and according to a top development scholar, this is even more…
| James Robinson | Robert H. Bates
Africa's Development in Historical Perspective. Robert H. Bates, Nathan Nunn, James Robinson, August 2014, Book. "This edited volume addresses the root causes of Africa's persistent poverty through an investigation of its longue durée history. It interrogates the African past through disease and demography, institutions and governance, African economies and the impact of the export slave trade, colonialism, Africa in the world economy, and…
| James Robinson
State Capacity and Economic Development: A Network Approach. James Robinson, January 8, 2014, Paper. "We study the direct and spillover effects of local state capacity using the network of Colombian municipalities. We model the determination of local and national state capacity as a network game in which each municipality, anticipating the choices and spillovers created by other municipalities and the decisions of the national government,…
| James Robinson
Economics versus Politics: Pitfalls of Policy Advice. James Robinson, Spring 2013, Paper. "The fundamental approach to policy prescription in economics derives from the recognition that the presence of market failures – like externalities, public goods, monopoly, and imperfect competition – creates room for well-designed public interventions to improve social welfare. This tradition, already clear in Pigou (1912), was elaborated by Samuelson (…
| James Robinson
CSES Lecture Series: Why Nations Fail by James Robinson. James Robinson, January 25, 2013, Video. "Modern economic growth rests on innovation; that is widely accepted. But innovation is usually seen as proportional to effort, investment, and levels of accumulated knowledge technological prowess. These are positive forces; but innovation also requires overcoming the negative forces of established authority, intellectual 'sunk costs,' and the…
| James Robinson
The Political Economy of Clientelism. James Robinson, 2013, Paper. "In this paper, we argue that the political-commitment problem provides an explanation for why much income redistribution takes an inefficient form, particularly employment in the public sector. A job is a credible way of redistributing when it provides rents (such as in situations with moral hazard), and employment is optimal ex post. Moreover, a job is selective and reversible…
| James Robinson
Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty. James Robinson, March 2012, Book. Publisher's description: "Brilliant and engagingly written, Why Nations Failanswers the question that has stumped the experts for centuries: Why are some nations rich and others poor, divided by wealth and poverty, health and sickness, food and famine? Is it culture, the weather, geography? Perhaps ignorance of what the right policies are? Simply,…
| James Robinson
Rarely Utilized - The Georgia Business Trust Code. James Robinson, 2008, Paper. "This group of statutory provisions-let us call it the" Georgia business trust code," for want of a better title-has been carried over from revision to revision of the Trust Act. Indeed, the proposed draft of the revamped Trust Act (now called the Georgia Trust Code) currently in ... "…