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 combine unsupervised machine-learning and econometric methods to examine cultural change in 16th- and 17th-century England. A machine-learning digest synthesizes the content of 57,863 texts comprising 83 million words into 110 topics. The topics include the expected, such as Natural...

Internalizing market transactions has been seen by New Institutional Economics (NIE) as a means of over-coming transaction costs. Several specific theories have been put forward as to how the presence of such costs (variously defined), or other institutional factors, motivates firms to...

Essay 1 investigates an empirical link between institutional variables and the performance of firms based on cross-country firm-level survey data. Current empirical evidence based on this type of data is unsatisfactory because employing survey responses as direct measures of institutional...

This thesis consists of three chapters on the choice of institutional governance. The first chapter provides empirical evidence on the effect of local norms on the contractual choice, using a comprehensive dataset on US agricultural leasing contracts. We focus on the choice between cash-rent and...