This study was motivated by the quest to investigate how the interaction between corruption and institutional quality affects Nigeria's economic performance by testing the validity of the "sand the wheels" and "grease the wheels" corruption hypothesis through the Barro-type endogenous growth...

We generate and analyze data pertinent to the role of caselaw in England's economic development during the Industrial Revolution. Applying topic modeling to a corpus of 67,455 reports on English court cases, we construct annual time series of caselaw developments between 1765 and 1865. We then...

While research in constitutional economics has made important progress in recent decades, the factors determining whether a constitution is complied with have only received scant attention. We contribute to that narrow literature by studying how personal traits of political leaders are...

Much political conflict in the world revolves around the issue of how much freedom to accord people. Liberal democracies are characterized by, e.g., the rule of law and a strong protection of civil rights, giving individuals a great deal of legally guaranteed freedom to lead their lives as they...

This article introduces a novel database that measures governments' compliance with national constitutions. It combines information on de jure constitutional rules with data on their de facto implementation. The individual compliance indicators can be grouped into four categories that we...

Judges are human beings. Is their behavior therefore subject to the same effects that psychology and behavioral economics have documented for convenience samples, like university students? Does that fact that they decide on behalf of third parties moderate their behavior? In which ways does the...

Objective This paper considers the influence of female legislators on gun legislation across US states. Females have behavioral differences from males and likely different exposure to gun-related violence. Method Using data from 1991-2020, we econometrically estimate the drivers of gun...

We bring attention to a previously overlooked determinant of de jure-de facto constitutional gaps: a polity's transition to a nation-state. We argue that nation-statehood, predicated on the formation of a strong sense of national identity, lowers the government's incentive to violate...

Spontaneous norms, or simply norms, can be defined as rules of conduct that emerge without intentional design and in the absence of purposeful external coordination. While the law and economics scholarship has formally analyzed spontaneous norms, the analysis has typically been limited to...