The debate over campaign-finance reform includes how different sources of campaign contributions affect the outcomes of political campaigns. Using data from the Congressional races of 1996, I find that PAC contributions had a larger effect on the percentage of votes received and campaign...

We investigate how liability rules and property rules affect the incentives to invest in research tools. We argue that it is hard to deter infringement under any of the enforcement regimes available. However, counter-intuitively, a credible threat of infringement can actually be beneficial to...

Most insurance premiums are only weakly linked to mileage, and have largely lump-sum characteristics. The probable result is too many accidents and too much driving from the standpoint of economic efficiency. This paper develops a model of the relationship between driving and accidents that...

Open source software development has organizational characteristics that are out of the ordinary (e.g., flatter hierarchy, self-organization, self-regulation, and no ownership structure). The study suggests that this organization of work can be explained by combining the recently developed...

This paper develops a proxy measure of the inequality of influence on the basis of survey evidence from 2002 Business Environment and Enterprise Performance Survey (BEEPS) conducted among 6,500 firms in 27 transition countries. We refer to the resulting inequality as crony bias in the political...

Based on the Business Environment and Enterprise Performance Survey (BEEPS) of firms in transition countries, which unbundles corruption to measure different types of corrupt transactions and provide detailed information on the characteristics and performance of firms, we find that: i)...

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,...

La presente obra se centra en uno de los problemas fundamentales de nuestra época: el desenvolvimiento económico de la convergencia y el crecimiento en las regiones considerando a las instituciones y el comercio internacional. A lo largo del libro el autor discute los modelos teóricos y...

The current organization of forensic work may induce biases in forensic analysis (Risinger et al. 2002). Such biases may have a differential impact across groups, creating differential bias. We should reorganize forensic work to reduce differential bias. The obvious strategy of hiring ethnically...

The Coasean way to deal with the cooperation failure that is implicit in Pareto inefficiency is to remove or lessen the obstacles to cooperation through the attribution of property rights and the elimination or reduction of transaction costs. The relevance of this approach is however undermined...