It is often argued that additional checks and balances provide economic agents with better protection from expropriation of their wealth or productive capital. We demonstrate that in a dynamic political economy model this intuition may be flawed. Surprisingly, increasing the number of veto...

This paper evaluates the importance of property rights institutions', which protect citizens against expropriation by the government and powerful elites, and contracting institutions', which enable private contracts between citizens. We exploit exogenous variation in both types of institutions...

"Why do some countries have growth-enhancing financial systems, while others do not? Why have some countries developed the necessary investor protection laws and contract-enforcement mechanisms to support financial institutions and markets, while others have not? This paper reviews existing...

Why do some countries have growth-enhancing financial systems, while others do not? Why have some countries developed the necessary investor protection laws and contract-enforcement mechanisms to support financial institutions and markets, while others have not? This paper reviews existing...

This paper provides a concise, selective review of research on the role of legal institutions in shaping the operation of financial systems. While a burgeoning literature finds that financial development exerts a first-order impact on economic growth, the law and finance literature seeks to...

Do societies choose inefficient policies and institutions, in contrast to what would be suggested by a reasoning extending the Coase Theorem to politics? Do societies choose inefficient policies and institutions because of differences in the beliefs and ideologies of their peoples or leaders? Or...

This note describes the unraveling of transaction dates in several markets, including the labor markets for new lawyers hired by large law firms and for gastroenterology fellows, and the market for post-season college football bowls. Together these will illustrate that unraveling can occur in...

This paper develops the empirical and theoretical case that differences in economic institutions are the fundamental cause of differences in economic development. We first document the empirical importance of institutions by focusing on two 'quasi-natural experiments' in history, the division of...

Standard approaches to environmental and natural resource use externalities generally focus on single-sector resources and user groups. Remedies include Pigouvian-style government constraints, small group controls following Elinor Ostrom, or less frequently, bargaining across users as outlined...

Why do inefficient -- non-growth enhancing -- institutions emerge and persist? This paper develops a simple framework to provide some answers to this question. Political institutions determine the allocation of political power, and economic institutions determine the framework for policy-making...