To ascertain the degree to which enterprises have soft budgets and to find the causes of softness, we surveyed 251 privatized Mongolian enterprises, asking whether state aid was expected when financial difficulties arose. One-quarter of the enterprises face soft budgets, a large proportion of...

To what extent do firms use trust, law, and third-parties to ensure fulfillment of agreements to transact? How do they combine these mechanisms to form transactional governance structures? How do answers to these questions vary across countries? Generating the relevant data requires constructing...

Prepared for the "Handbook Of New Institutional Economics." Focusing on firm behavior, the paper examines the collapse of socialist institutions, the building of capitalist institutions, changing firm boundaries, transactional governance, corporate governance, and use of the legal system. The...

At present, there is no generally accepted accounting of the institutional strengths and weaknesses of the transition economies. The first goal of the paper is to fill this gap by assessing current levels of institutional development. The second is to examine which types of institutional...

The English version of this paper is at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=878672 Chinese Abstract:...

This paper develops a structural approach for modeling how respondents answer survey questions and uses it to estimate the proportion of respondents who are reticent in answering corruption questions, as well as the extent to which reticent behavior biases down conventional estimates of...

Conventional wisdom on English development confers iconic status on the clause of the Act of Settlement (1701) that mandated secure tenure for judges. Because the Act's effect on tenure was partial, the effect of tenure on judicial decisions can be identified. The paper estimates how the...

A characterization of the ideas of Francis Bacon and Edward Coke, two paramount English lawyer-scholars, provides insights into the nature of the legal-intellectual culture of early seventeenth-century England. To develop the insights we employ a methodology not previously used in this context,...

To what extent do firms use trust, law, and third-parties to ensure fulfillment of agreements to transact? How do they combine these mechanisms to form transactional governance structures? How do answers to these questions vary across countries? Generating the relevant data requires constructing...

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...