The EU Water Framework Directive clearly integrates economics into water management and policy making, and economics is to have a decisive role in the development of the programme of measures and the new river basin management plans. This paper provides a brief overview of the contribution of...

One of the essential conditions to conclude al-Rahn (pledge) contract is to ensure that the pledged asset (Mal al-Marhun) is available during contract execution. The absence of this aspect may trigger the issue of Gharar (uncertainty) which would affect the validity of al-Rahn contract. This...

Notwithstanding the fact that the world’s major religions espouse the principle of inter-religion tolerance, religion has, arguably, replaced ideology in the 21st century as the main destructive force in human affairs. This is because religion, more than a set of theological beliefs, is an...

Many countries badly mismanage their natural resource endowments. We argue that a fundamental change in paradigm is needed. Specifically, we advocate treating non-renewable natural resources as a finite shared inheritance asset, and extraction as the sale of the inherited wealth. We identify...

Institutions are usually defined as rules of the game. But if rules are dead letters without being enforced, then what is the role of destructive power in the genesis of institutions? This is the first question which will be addressed in the present paper. While the importance of incremental or...

We experimentally study the effects of the split-award tort reform, where the state takes a share of the plaintiff's punitive damage award, on litigants' beliefs and bargaining outcomes. In addition, we study the formation of litigants' beliefs in a strategic environment. Our results provide...

Our paper addresses the question of the deterrent effect of a monetary sanction associated to a collective rather than an individual liability, when crimes are realized within a hierarchical gang (defined as a criminal organization where the leader is a sleeping partner, and several agents are...

Some states treat a same-sex marriage as legally equal to a marriage between a man and a woman. Other states prohibit legal recognition of same-sex marriages in their constitutions. In every state that has a constitutional restriction against same-sex marriage, the amendment was passed by a...

Many claims about political behavior are based on implicit assumptions about how people think. One such assumption, that political actors use identical conjectures when assessing others’ strategies, is nested within applications of widely-used game theoretic equilibrium concepts. When...

The article tackles the state-of-play of the European debate with respect to the representative action as form of enhanced antitrust private enforcement. First it takes into consideration the US precedent. Then it outlines the current debate at European level (White Paper), both on the basis of...