Legal institutions are critical for the development of market-based economies. This paper defines legal institutions and discusses different indicators to measure their quality and efficiency. It surveys a large historical and empirical literature showing the importance of legal institutions in...

Impersonal exchange has been a major driver of economic development. But transactors with no stake in maintaining an ongoing relationship have little incentive to honor deals. Therefore, all economies have developed institutions to support honest trade and realize the gains of impersonal...

The productivity slowdown in Europe since the mid-1990s is a reason for concern. Labour market rigidity, hampering innovation, may be a cause of the slowdown. In the paper this argument is placed in a broader perspective. Labour force participation is an important factor in explaining...

In this paper we experimentally investigate the extended game with observable delay of Hamilton and Slutsky (Games Econ.Beh., 1990).Firms bindingly announce a production period (one out of two periods) and then they produce in the announced sequence.Theory predicts simultaneous production in...

This paper reports the results of an experiment evaluating three regulatory schemes for network infrastructure, in terms of their ability to generate efficient levels of capacity investment. We compare the performance of (1) price cap regulation, (2) a regulatory holiday for new capacity, and...