International climate protection investments (Joint Implementation and Clean Development Mechanism projects) are burdened with problems of contract enforcement, which prevent the realisation of efficiency gains associated with these investments. The paper analyses this problem from the...

A government bargains a mutually convenient agreement with a multinational corporation to extract a natural resource. The corporation bears the initial investment and earns as a return a share on the profits. The host country provides access and guarantee conditions of operation. Being the...

In this paper, we develop a simple model of social dynamics governing the evolution of strategic self-protection choices of boundedly rational potential victims facing the threat of prospective offenders in a large population with random matching. We prove that individual (and socially...

In this article we apply and extend the model elaborated by Acemoglu and Verdier in their seminal paper (2000), to examine how the economy represented in their theoretical framework responds to an exogenous change in the agent's incentive. In particular, we focus on the consequences of a famous...

We investigate the origin, impact and evolution of citizenship laws. Citizenship laws originate from the common and civil law traditions, which apply jus soli and jus sanguinis, respectively. We compile a data set across countries of the world starting from the 19th century. The impact of the...

We build a simple model of legal dualism in which a pro-poor legal reform, under certain conditions, causes the conflicting custom to go some way toward producing the change intended by the legislator. It then acts as an "outside anchor" that exerts a "magnet effect" on the custom. We illustrate...

When procurement contracts are awarded through competitive tendering participating firms commit ex ante to fulfil a set of contractual duties. However, selected contractors may find profitable to renege ex post on their promises by opportunistically delivering lower quality standards. In order...

Time overruns are common in public works and are not confined to inherently complex tasks. One explanation advanced in this paper is that bidders can undergo unpredictable changes in production costs which generate an option value of waiting. By exploiting the real-option approach, we examine...

In 2004, ten new states entered the European Union. Relative to the pre-2004 member states, these accession states have lower environmental standards, and some worry that it will be too demanding for these new EU members to fully comply with European environmental provisions. In this paper, we...

This paper investigates the relative impact of regional energy production on the legislative choices of Russian Duma deputies on energy regulation between 1994 and 2003. We apply Poole’s optimal classification method of roll call votes using an ordered probit model to explain energy law reform...