Globalisation, governance and economic performance affect each other in very complex mutual relationships. In this paper, we establish a clear and well-circumscribed hypothesis: “is there an effect of globalisation on governance?” To test this hypothesis or, even more specifically, to test...

The Hayek Hypothesis holds that prices contain enough information to direct the resources in the economy to their most efficient use. In a series of experiments, Vernon Smith [1987] found that with the right trading institutions, a market with agents that know only their own valuations of a good...

This paper proposes a two-country 'economic' model (in the sense that it contains utility and profit maximization motives), in which a low-income economy enjoys a high growth rate relative to a high-income economy, thanks to importing technologies (or 'machines') invented in the high- income...

The paper analyzes investment behavior of industrial enterprises in the period immediately following price and foreign trade liberalization in the Czech Republic. It also focuses on the effect of Asoft@ macroeconomic environment on the microeconomic decisions. A dynamic investment function with...

Conviction rates in Japan exceed 99 percent -- why? On the one hand, because Japanese prosecutors are badly understaffed they may prosecute only their strongest cases and present judges only with the most obviously guilty defendants. On the other, because Japanese judges can be reassigned by the...

In this paper we explain the prevalence of explicit contracts of employment, particularly those that embody high- rather than low-powered incentives and clauses that supersede the common law defaults. Our analysis is based on an understanding of two fundamental problems that arise when agency...

We use new firm-level data to examine the effects of spinoffs and privatization on corporate performance in a rapidly emerging market economy. Unlike the existing literature, which analyzes spinoffs almost exclusively in advanced economies, we control for accompanying ownership changes and the...

This essay brings fiscal federalism theory into contact with the knowledge perspective to economic organization. The question addressed is: can a central government be justified in the context of fiscal federalism on grounds of economic organization? We point out that if one looks at the...

Software is a potentially excludable public good. It is possible, at some cost, to exclude non-paying users from its consumption by using copyright law or technological restraints. Licensing the software under proprietary license terms makes of it a private good, licensing it under the BSD does...