Although property rights are key, their determinants are still poorly understood. When property is fully protected, some potential buyers with valuation higher than that of original owners are inefficiently excluded from trade due to transaction costs. When property rights are weak,...

Despite the huge evidence on the adverse impact of extractive policies, we still lack a formal framework to identify their origins and role. Here, we lay out a two-region, two-social class model for thinking about this issue, and we exploit its implications to propose a novel account of the...

Understanding the origins of formal and informal institutions of cooperation and regulation and their long-lasting impact on market exchange and technological investment is one of the most pressing questions in law, economics and history. Accordingly, despite the different angles considered by...

To evaluate the relative importance of a culture of cooperation and inclusive political institutions, I divide Europe into 120 km X 120 km grid cells, and I exploit the exogenous variation in both institutions created by medieval history. To illustrate, I document strong first-stage...

We identify a key trade-off between protecting property rights and enhancing reliance on contracts. For instance, when a dishonest intermediary transfers a good to an innocent buyer without the owner's consent, who between buyer and owner should retain the good? We show that the optimal...