This paper reviews the main motivations and arguments of my work on comparative development, colonialism, and institutional change, which was often carried out jointly with James Robinson and Simon Johnson. I then provide a simple framework to organize these ideas and connect them with my research on innovation and technology. The framework is centered around a utility-technology possibilities frontier, which delineates the possible distributions of resources in a society both for given technology and working via different technological choices. It highlights how various types of institutions, market structures, norms, and ideologies influence moves along the frontier and shifts of the frontier, and it provides a simple formalization of the social forces that lead to institutional persistence and those that can trigger institutional change. The framework also enables us to conceptualize how, during periods of disruption, existing—and sometimes quite small—differences can have amplified effects on prosperity and institutional trajectories. In this way, it suggests some parallels between different disruptive periods, including the onset of European colonialism, the spread (or lack thereof) of industrial technologies in the nineteenth century, and decisions related to the use, adoption, and development of AI today.

This paper proposes a new framework for studying the interplay between culture and institutions. We interpret culture as a repertoire, consisting of (cultural) attributes and allowing rich cultural responses to political changes. Combinations of attributes produce cultural configurations, which provide social meaning, coordination and political justification. Our framework has several distinctive features. First, it proposes a “systems approach” to culture: the meaning and function of attributes are determined within the whole configuration and political equilibrium. Second, it emphasizes discontinuous or “saltational” changes in culture—rather than gradual, evolutionary changes—as attributes are reconnected and acquire new meanings in response to evolving circumstances and as outcomes in ongoing “cultural struggles”. Third, our framework puts the spotlight on how fluidly different cultures can respond to conditions, depending on the nature of their attributes and constraints on their connections. Finally, it enriches the study of the co-determination of political, institutional and cultural outcomes.

This paper develops a model to study the macroeconomic implications of supply chain disruptions with three key ingredients: (i) a firm-level network of customized supplier–customer links that generate relationship-specific productivity gains; (ii) bargaining over these relationship-specific surpluses; and (iii) an extensive margin of adjustment, whereby firms decide to form or sever relations with suppliers and customers. We establish equilibrium existence and uniqueness, provide characterization results, and present a number of comparative statics that show how supply chains and aggregate output respond to shocks. We also show that equilibrium supply chains are inefficient and exhibit an inherent fragility: small shocks can lead to discontinuous changes in output, even though the efficient allocation is always continuous in the same shocks. We explore several macroeconomic implications of this fragility.

Using large-scale survey data covering more than 110 countries and exploiting within-country variation across cohorts and surveys, we show that individuals with longer exposure to democracy display stronger support for democratic institutions, and that this effect is almost entirely driven by exposure to democracies with successful performance in terms of economic growth, control of corruption, peace and political stability, and public goods provision. Across a variety of specifications, estimation methods, and samples, the results are robust, and the timing and nature of the effects are consistent with our interpretation. We also present suggestive evidence that democratic institutions that receive support from their citizens perform better in the face of negative shocks.