"Political Institutions and Financial Development" demonstrates that political institutions are the primary drivers of a country's financial system and that getting politics right is essential to creating a healthy financial system and a vibrant economy.

Stephen Haber is A.A. and Jeanne Welch Milligan Professor in the School of Humanities at Stanford University and a Senior Fellow of the Hoover Institution. He is the author of How Latin America Fell Behind: Essays on the Economic Histories of Brazil and Mexico, 1800-1914; Industry and Underdevelopment: The Industrialization of Mexico, 1890-1940; and The Politics of Property Rights: Political Instability, Credible Commitments, and Economic Growth in Mexico, 1876-1929 (with Armando Razo and Noel Maurer). Douglass C. North is a pioneering economic historian and the co-recipient of the Nobel Prize in Economics (1993). A Professor of Economics at Washington University and a Senior Fellow of the Hoover Institution, he is the author of Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance and Understanding the Process of Economic Change. Barry R. Weingast is the Ward C. Krebs Professor of Political Science at Stanford University and a Senior Fellow of the Hoover Institution as well as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is the author of Positive Theories of Congressional Institutions (with Kenneth A. Shepsle); Preferences and Situations: Points of Contact between Historical and Rational Choice Institutionalisms (with Ira Katznelson); and The Handbook Political Economy (with Donald Wittman).