I analyze the basis of the market economy in classical Rome, from the perspective of personal-versus-impersonal exchange and focusing on the role of the state in providing market-enabling institutions. I start by reviewing the central conflict in all exchanges between those holding and those...

This chapter proposes two hypotheses on the publicity requirement and the limitations of possession to provide information for legal titling. It then tests these hypotheses by examining how legal systems deal with possession in movable and immovable property, and comparing actual and documentary...

Adopting a simplistic view of Coase (1960), most economic analyses of property rights disregard both the key advantage that legal property rights (that is, in rem rights) provide to rightholders in terms of enhanced enforcement, and the difficulties they pose to acquirers in terms of information...

This paper investigates the design of optimal procurement mechanisms in the presence of corruption. After the sponsor and the contractor sign the contract, the latter may bribe the inspector to misrepresent quality. Thus, the mechanism affects whether bribery occurs. I show how to include...

We set up a signaling game where individuals differ in ability and wealth. Higher ability means larger benefit supported by the government. Costly signals are used to transmit information regarding own deservingness. However, capital market imperfections may perturb the signals by limiting the...

Manipulation of government finances for the benefit of narrowly defined groups is usually thought to be limited to the part of the budget over which politicians exercise discretion in the short run, such as earmarks. Analyzing a revenue-sharing program between the central and local governments...

We report results from a randomized policy experiment designed to test whether increased audit risk deters rent extraction in local public procurement and service delivery in Brazil. Our estimates suggest that temporarily increasing annual audit risk by about 20 percentage points reduced the...