We examine how Russian enterprises do business with one another, focusing on the strategies used to obtain efficiency and predictability in their transactions. Using survey data, the paper analyzes the relative importance of relational contracting, self-enforcement, enterprise networks, private...

Organized legal professions are typically viewed by economists as rent-seeking interest groups. Starting from the observation that the legal professions have been central in institutional development in countries with the highest quality institutions, we add a different perspective, developing a...

We revisit the ubiquitous claim that aiding civil society improves institutional outcomes. In our model, a vibrant civil society initiates public debate in a reform process that would otherwise be dominated by partisan interest groups and politicians. By altering the incentives of interest...

Although a common institutional arrangement, self-regulation as an alternative to direct government regulation has received relatively little attention from economists. This paper uses a framework inspired by property rights theory to analyze the allocation of regulatory authority. In a model of...

Prepared for the Handbook Of New Institutional Economics, this chapter focuses on how the NIE has been used to understand transition and how the experience of transition can help inform the NIE. It first shows that the NIE, as an analytical tool, hardly played any role at all in early...

A potential concern with survey-based data on corruption is that respondents may not be fully candid in their responses to sensitive questions. If reticent respondents are less likely to admit to involvement in corrupt acts, and if the proportion of reticent respondents varies across groups of...

Organized legal professions often play a central role in successful institutional development. The paper’s model examines how legal professions affect institutional reform. Professional review of reform proposals solves a politician’s informational problem in a way that makes democracy,...

Identifying the most important systemic characteristics that have determined the behavior of Centrally Planned Economies (CPEs), is crucial for the choice of a transition path within the ongoing economic reforms in these countries. The empirical literature on the comparative behavior of CPEs and...

The role of interest groups in the political process has been the subject of much analysis in both political science and economics. However, few studies have examined directly the factors which influence the variation in interest group formation across industrial sectors and between countries....