Roe, Mark J., and Jordan I. Siegel. "Political Instability: Effects on Financial Development, Roots in the Severity of Economic Inequality." Journal of Comparative Economics 39, no. 3 (September 2011): 279–309. (We here bring forward strong evidence that political instability impedes financial development, with its variation a primary determinant of differences in financial development around the world. As such, it needs to be added to the short list of major determinants of financial development. First, structural conditions first postulated by Engerman and Sokoloff (2002) as generating long-term inequality are shown here empirically to be exogenous determinants of political instability. Second, that exogenously-determined political instability in turn holds back financial development, even when we control for factors prominent in the last decade's cross-country studies of financial development. The findings indicate that inequality-perpetuating conditions that result in political instability are fundamental roadblocks for international organizations like the World Bank that seek to promote financial development. The evidence here includes country fixed effect regressions and an instrumental model inspired by Engerman and Sokoloff's (2002) work, which to our knowledge has not yet been used in finance and which is consistent with current tests as valid instruments. Four conventional measures of national political instability — Alesina and Perotti's (1996) well-known index of instability, a subsequent index derived from Banks' (2005) work, and two indices of managerial perceptions of nation-by-nation political instability — persistently predict a wide range of national financial development outcomes for recent decades. Political instability's significance is time consistent in cross-sectional regressions back to the 1960's, the period when the key data becomes available, robust in both country fixed-effects and instrumental variable regressions, and consistent across multiple measures of instability and of financial development. Overall, the results indicate the existence of an important channel running from structural inequality to political instability, principally in nondemocratic settings, and then to financial backwardness. The robust significance of that channel extends existing work demonstrating the importance of political economy explanations for financial development and financial backwardness. It should help to better understand which policies will work for financial development, because political instability has causes, cures, and effects quite distinct from those of many of the key institutions most studied in the past decade as explaining financial backwardness.)

Moss, David A., Louis T. Wells Jr., and Lakshmi Gopalan. "International Institutions." Harvard Business School Background Note 796-116, February 1996.

Rithmire, Meg. "Land Institutions and Chinese Political Economy: Institutional Complementarities and Macroeconomic Management." Politics & Society 45, no. 1 (March 2017): 123–153.

Paine, Lynn S. Risk Management and Oversight." Panel Moderator. "Colloquium on the Governance of Financial Institutions. Lecture at the Colloquium on the Governance of Financial Institutions, Center for Strategic & International Studies, Hills Program on Governance, New York, NY, November 03–04, 2009.

Sen, Ishita, Lorenzo Bretscher, Lukas Schmid, and Varun Sharma. "Institutional Corporate Bond Pricing." Review of Financial Studies (forthcoming).

Montgomery, Cynthia A., Michael Shih-Ta Chen, and Dawn Lau. "CARD Group: Mutually Reinforcing Institutions." Harvard Business School Case 712-414, September 2011. (Revised December 2011.)

Alfaro, Laura, Saleem Bahaj, Robert Czech, Jonathan Hazell, and Ioana Neamtu. "LASH Risk and Interest Rates." Bank of England Staff Working Papers, No. 1,073, May 2024. (NBER Working Paper Series, No. 33241, December 2024.)

Hawkins, David F. "Perspective, Institutions and Basic Issues." Harvard Business School Background Note 100-010, November 1999. (Revised November 2003.)

Healy, Paul M., Amy P. Hutton, Robert S. Kaplan, and Krishna G. Palepu. "Financial Reporting Environment, The." Harvard Business School Background Note 102-029, September 2001.