In this paper I show that the capacity for a legal regime to generate value-enhancing legal adaptation to local and changing conditions through adjudication depends on its capacity to generate and implement adequate expertise about the environment in which law is applied (shared legal human...

We develop a framework that examines the organizational challenges faced by central rulers governing large territories, where administrative power needs to be delegated to local elites. We describe how economic change can motivate rulers to empower different elites and emphasize the interaction...

To what extent do imposed institutions shape preferences? We consider this issue by comparing the market-versus-state attitudes of respondents from a capitalist country, Finland, and an ex-communist group of Baltic countries, and arguing that the period under the communist rule can be viewed as...

Social contracts about inequality and redistribution are country-specific. We rely on a model of inequality and redistribution where multiple steady states can emerge in given country. We link the model to the recent literature on beliefs and argue that beliefs are a major determinant of which...

Previous empirical studies have found that the institutions and policies of democracies are generally more supportive of economic freedom than authoritarian political regimes. This paper employs a new dataset by Cheibub et al. (2010) to examine the impact of transitions to democracy on economic...

We link a model of inequality and redistribution where multiple steady states can emerge, to the recent literature on beliefs, and argue that changes in beliefs may shift the equilibrium over time. We present evidence that beliefs are typically very stable over time, yet argue that Brazil has...

This paper proposes a new instrument for institutional quality which varies across countries with historically low rates of European settlement. Using a new data set which exploits differences in the quality of colonial administration, it finds evidence that colonies with better paid colonial...

We propose a general theory that explains the extent of the state and accounts for related institutions as byproducts of the state's extractive technology. We posit further that this extractive technology is determined by the transparency of the production technology. This theory is applied to...

In this paper, we provide a new framework for analyzing corruption in public bureaucracies. The standard way to model corruption is as an example of moral hazard, which then leads to a focus on better monitoring and stricter penalties with the eradication of corruption as the final goal. We...