What role should for-profit organizations play in governing commercial transactions? Recent scholarship on the privatization of commercial law has advocated expanding the role of for-profits. This essay tests the merits of that proposal in a context where the case for relying on for-profits seem...

This essay addresses the question of whether there is any set of legal institutions that invariably promotes development. ‘Universalistic’ arguments answer this question in the affirmative. The essay begins by rehearsing classic objections to legal universalism. It then shows how those...

What role do foreign institutions play in combating political corruption in developing countries? This chapter begins by describing the recently developed transnational anti-corruption regime, which encompasses legal instruments ranging from the dedicated multilateral agreements sponsored by the...

This essay serves as the introduction to a collection of critical writings on the relationship between institutions and economic performance. The essay not only provides an overview of the field but also explores some of the thorny questions surrounding the definition and measurement of institutions

This article analyzes a number of yearly reports from the World Bank's Doing Business project, an ambitious international effort to measure various aspects of law and development, analyze their inter-relationship, develop benchmarks for assessment of legal systems, and suggest legal reforms....

We examine whether the parties to international commercial arbitration ought to have access to discovery through the federal courts of the United States. 28 U.S.C § 1782 permits U.S. courts to compel the exchange of information “for use in a proceeding in a foreign or international...

Economic analyses of law enforcement generally focus on situations in which law is enforced by a single public agency in a single jurisdiction which faithfully follows its announced enforcement strategy. This does not reflect the reality of enforcement aimed at corporate crime, which commonly...

This article revisits the debate over appropriate approaches to the regulation of technology transfer to developing countries. It begins by contrasting two stylized approaches, labeled for convenience the "New International Economic Order" model and the "Globalization" model, which have...

Economists often presume that the costs of drafting contracts are directly related to the ‘completeness' of the contracts in question. This may be a reasonable presumption when contractual documents are drafted from scratch. But anyone who has drafted a contract knows that it is typically much...