There is a secret paradox at the heart of social contract theories. Such theories assume that, because personal security and private property are at risk in a state of nature, subjects will agree to grant Leviathan a monopoly of violence. But what is to prevent Leviathan from turning on his...

Traditionally, national governance and corruption challenges have been seen as: i) particularly daunting in the poorer countries, with the richer world viewed as exemplary; ii) anchored within a legalistic framework and focused on formal institutions, iii) a challenge within public sectors, and,...

What determines the wealth of nations? If anyone knew the answer to that question, no-one would have heard of Adam Smith as an economist, and for that matter all economists. Economics is really the study of wealth creation under scarcity. The reason economists and others have a hard time pinning...

Nous étudions l'impact des regroupements municipaux survenus au Québec entre 1992 et 1999 sur les taux de taxation effectifs et la valeur marchande des propriétés résidentielles. Nous montrons que l'effet d'un regroupement sur ces deux volets de la vie municipale est indéterminé....

This paper presents estimates of six dimensions of governance covering 199 countries and territories for four time periods: 1996, 1998, 2000, and 2002. These indicators are based on several hundred individual variables measuring perceptions of governance, drawn from 25 separate data sources...

The Easterlin Paradox refers to the fact that happiness data are typically stationary in spite of considerable increases in income. This amounts to a rejection of the hypothesis that current income is the only argument in the utility function. One possible answer is that human development...

This paper analyses market competition between two different types of credit card platforms: not-for-profit associations and proprietary systems. The main focus is on the role of the interchange fee set by not-for-profit platforms. We show that when the interchange fee is set so as to maximise...

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...

A fundamental aspect of any open payment system is the interchange fee that is paid from the merchant's bank to the cardholder's bank. Using a model in which there is partial participation by heterogeneous consumers and merchants, this paper characterizes the output maximizing, profit maximizing...