In economic development, institutions and organizations are critical elements which can be looked upon as rules and players of a game, respectively. Investigating how institutions evolve and why certain organizations emerge may help us better understand economic development, especially when the...

External agents are frequently characterized as necessary for efficiency in team production settings. At the same time, these agents must be constrained from opportunistically exercising their enforcement capabilities. I argue that collective action costs and formal institutions (e.g., golden...

Economic models of crime and punishment implicitly assume that the government can credibly commit to the fines, sentences, and apprehension rates it has chosen. We study the government's problem when credibility is an issue. We find that several of the standard predictions of the economic model...