What forces lead to democracy's creation? Why does it sometimes consolidate only to collapse at other times? Written by two of the foremost authorities on this subject in the world, this volume develops a framework for analyzing the creation and consolidation of democracy. It revolutionizes scholarship on the factors underlying government and popular movements toward democracy or dictatorship. Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson argue that different social groups prefer different political institutions because of the way they allocate political power and resources. Their book, the subject of a...

What forces lead to democracy's creation? Why does it sometimes consolidate only to collapse at other times? Written by two of the foremost authorities on this subject in the world, this volume develops a framework for analyzing the creation and consolidation of democracy. It revolutionizes scholarship on the factors underlying government and popular movements toward democracy or dictatorship. Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson argue that different social groups prefer different political institutions because of the way they allocate political power and resources. Their book, the subject of a...

The "NBER Macroeconomics Annual" provides a forum for important debates in contemporary macroeconomics and major developments in the theory of macroeconomic analysis and policy that include leading economists from a variety of fields. The papers and accompanying discussions in "NBER Macroeconomics Annual 2009" address how heterogeneous beliefs interact with equilibrium leverage and potentially lead to leverage cycles, the validity of alternative hypotheses about the reason for the recent increase in foreclosures on residential mortgages, the credit rating crisis, quantitative implications for...

The NBER Macroeconomics Annual features theoretical and empirical contributions to the study of macroeconomics, addressing central issues within the discipline. These issues range from short-run macroeconomic fluctuations to international economic crises and long-run economic growth. Continuing in this tradition, NBER Macroeconomics Annual 2010 contains six papers that each tackle an important area in macroeconomics and serve to advance discourse within the field. This volume offers papers that reflect upon a variety of topics, including the recent financial crisis and the response of...

The twenty-seventh edition of the NBER Macroeconomics Annual continues a tradition of featuring theoretical and empirical contributions that shed light on central issues in contemporary macroeconomics, pushing the frontiers of macroeconomic research on topics related to both the business cycle and economic growth and addressing important policy-relevant questions. This year s volume features two papers that illuminate two causes of the recent financial crisis: how firms accessed credit during the financial crisis and how the risk in mortgage lending was measured in the UK in the decades...