Although society as a whole may benefit from an independent judiciary, it is not clear that individual politicians do: an independent court is one that can tell a politician not to do what he or she would like. This paper develops a simple model in which incumbent politicians choose the level of...

Governments in the advanced industrial countries increasingly rely on supply-side reforms to intervene in the economy. This article examines one such reform, that of vocational education and training in France, whose successful implementation required that private actors cooperate not with the...

The trajectory of institutional economics changed in the 1970s when new institutional economics (NIE) began to take shape around some relative vague intuitions which eventually developed into powerful conceptual and analytical tools. The emergence of NIE is a success story by many measures: four...

The role of institutions in the process of economic growth and development has generated considerable interest among researchers over the past few decades. In particular, incorporating institutional variables into the established growth theories and empirics involves understanding the impact and...

In African health care the "miracle of the market" has not occurred. Patients exhibit willingness to pay for quality health care and yet good private practitioners are unable to sell their services. Simultaneously nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) are running successful health facilities for...

This paper argues that in the middle ages voting institutions emerged as mechanisms that allowed rulers to cooperate with subjects on mutually profitable projects. In spite of their utility, many of these voting institutions eventually declined. We test the model on the English parliament and...

This paper explores the interdependence between market structure and an important class of extra-rational cognitive biases. Starting with a familiar bilateral monopoly framework, we characterize the endogenous emergence of preference distortions during bargaining which cause negotiators to...

Must the integration of markets be accompanied by the harmonization of societies' institutions? We study a model of heterogenous individuals where a public good directly affects returns from trade. Trade takes place in the market, whereas the public good is provided by the jurisdiction, and...