The management literature is paying increasing attention to the phenomenon of imitation. However, there are several gaps in understanding what drives firms imitative behaviors. Furthermore, a fragmented array of disciplinary perspectives has investigated imitation phenomena in the past. This...

It is sometimes observed that in our complex, technologically-dynamic world, legal institutions attempt to import science into law and export law’s problems to science. This essay assesses the relation of risk, science and law in the World Trade Organization (WTO). It responds to the question...

Coase’s work emphasized the economic importance of very small markets and made a new, more marginalist form of economic “institutionalism” acceptable within mainstream economics. A Coasean market is an association of persons with competing claims on a legal entitlement that can be traded....

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...