The paper provides a formal framework identifying both the origins and interaction of a culture of cooperation and inclusive political institutions. When elite members and citizens try to cooperate in sharing consumption risk and joint investment, the elite enacts democracy to convince the...

The choice of whether to regulate firms or to allow them to compete is key. If the demand is sufficiently inelastic, competition entails narrower allocative inefficiencies but, also, smaller expected profits and, thus, weaker incentives to invest in cost reduction. Hence, deregulation should be...

The determinants of incentive regulation are a key issue in economics. More powerful rules relax allocative distortions at the cost of lower rent extraction. Thus, they should be found where the reformer is more concerned about incentivizing investments through higher expected profits, and where...

This chapter, written for the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Law and Economics (Francesco Parisi, ed.) draws a general picture of the differences between carrots and sticks. We discuss incentives effects (in principle, a $100 carrot creates the same incentives as a $100 stick, but there are...

A key feature of a legal system is the set of institutions used to aggregate the citizens' preferences over the harshness of punishment, i.e., the legal tradition. While under common law appellate judges' biases offset one another at the cost of volatility of the law, under civil law the...

We distinguish among three types of actions that can be taken to alleviate the consequences of natural disasters: precautionary efforts (made ex ante), relief efforts (made in the immediate aftermath of a disaster), and recovery efforts (made ex post). We argue that recognizing this distinction...

A key question in comparative law is why different legal systems provide different legal solutions for the same problem. To answer this question, we use novel comparative evidence on how the conflict between the dispossessed original owner and the bona fide purchaser of a stolen good is resolved...

Outcomes are deeply influenced by the set of institutions used to aggregate the citizens' preferences over the harshness of punishment, i.e., the legal tradition. I show that while under common law appellate judges' biases offset one another at the cost of legal uncertainty, under civil law the...

This paper studies pricing decisions in two-sided markets when platforms are needed simultaneously for the successful completion of a transaction. The model is a natural extension of the Cournot-Ellet theory of complementary monopoly featuring clear cut asymmetric single- and multihoming...