Reasons for the joint use of ex ante regulation and ex pos t liability to cope with environmental accidents have been a longstanding issue in law and economics literature. This article, which includes the first empirical study of the French environmental legal system, analyzes courts’...

Essential to the Madisonian conception of checks and balances is the division of policy-making authority among multiple actors such that each can veto proposed changes in policy. We use a mechanism design approach to analyze checks and balances institutions. We show that checks and balances...

The United Nations Global Compact (UNGC) has generated a lively debate among academics, activists, and policy practitioners. Given the scope and ambition of this program, and the prestige of the United Nations associated with it, its supporters believe it will fundamentally reshape how...

The claim that the Darwinian paradigm of blind-variation-and-selective-retention can be generalized from the biological to the socio-cultural realm has often been questioned because of the critical role played by human purposeful design in the process of cultural evolution. In light of the issue...

While many recommend electoral democracy as a way to avoid or resolve civil conflict, the empirical record of electoral democracy as an alternative to civil conflict is decidedly mixed. We apply recent work from new organizational economics on the nature of elite pacts to add to both sides of...