Organized legal professions are typically viewed by economists as rent-seeking interest groups. Starting from the observation that the legal professions have been central in institutional development in countries with the highest quality institutions, we add a different perspective, developing a...

At present, there is no generally accepted accounting of the institutional strengths and weaknesses of the transition economies. The first goal of the paper is to fill this gap by assessing current levels of institutional development. The second is to examine which types of institutional...

Prepared for the Handbook Of New Institutional Economics, this chapter focuses on how the NIE has been used to understand transition and how the experience of transition can help inform the NIE. It first shows that the NIE, as an analytical tool, hardly played any role at all in early...

How quickly do firms respond to new institutions? Romanian survey data permits investigation of this question, using variables summarizing firms' strategies on transactional governance. These variables are regressed on the factors that should determine efficient behavior according to standard...

The paper proposes a methodology to obtain evidence on the relative importance of different mechanisms for supporting agreements. A survey question posed to company directors summarizes key aspects of mechanisms and asks for judgments on use. In contrast to existing approaches, the data covers...

We estimate the rate of embodied technological change directly from plant-level manufacturing data on current output and input choices along with histories on their vintages of equipment investment. Our estimates range between 8 and 17 percent for the typical U.S. manufacturing plant during the...

This paper provides a description of the dynamic choices of manufacturing plants when they undertake rapid adjustment in output. The focus is on epsodes that involve lumpy adjustment in capital or employment. I examine the behavior of variables such as capital utilization, hours per worker,...

In this paper we provide a brief summary and evaluation of the main economic changes or 'reforms' undertaken by the Cuban government during the 1990's. The thrust of our argument is that the regime does not seem to be interested in reforms that lead to a transition to a market economy or even in...

In this study we address the following question-- what determines the allocation of publicly-provided goods to rural households in India? Our paper is empirically driven but we draw on the characteristics of India's institutional structure and the implications of existing literature for framing...

In this paper we bring together three different strands of literature to raise and answer the question posed in the title. The literature in the Kuznets tradition applied to services raises the question of whether the pattern observed for services, namely a rising share of GDP, is also observed...