Authoritarian leaders frequently send mixed messages about law. While official rhetoric typically emphasizes obeying law, leaders have proven willing to sidestep the law when it proves inconvenient. We explore the impact of this duality on the attitudes of Russian citizens, drawing on three...

Spurred by the observation that the organized legal professions have been central in institutional development in countries with the highest quality institutions, we develop a model that identifies the link between the role of organized professions and the quality of institutional reform....

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...

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 otherwise dominated by partisan interest groups and politicians. Civil society involvement can alleviate or aggravate...

We examine spatial spillovers between countries in the development of institutions. Our dependent variables are three measures of institutions that relate to politics, law, and governmental administration. The major explanatory variable on which we focus is a spatial lag of the dependent...

The paper examines existing results on the relationship between growth performance and speed of liberalization during transition. Several influential studies contain methodological problems that preclude interpretation of their results as bearing on the effects of speed of reform and that...

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...

We examine the effect of relationship-specific investment on contract complexity, which has broad implications because complex contracts and vertical integration have similar causal origins. It is usually assumed that transaction cost economics (TCE) implies that relationship-specific investment...

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...

How quickly do firms respond to new institutions? Romanian survey data permits investigation of this question, using variables summarizing firms' strategies on transactional governance. These variables are regressed on the factors that should determine efficient behavior according to standard...