This research examines the economic origins of Islam and uncovers two empirical regularities. First, Muslim countries, virtual countries and ethnic groups, exhibit highly unequal regional agricultural endowments. Second, Muslim adherence is systematically larger along the pre-Islamic trade...

Internet resources, extended media coverage and international organizations’ reports recently witness the increasing interest of western banks in new models of finance, particularly Islamic finance and microfinance. This new trend is not only channeled through the frame of corporate social...

The literature on public goods has shown that efficient outcomes are impossible if participation constraints have to be respected. This paper addresses the question whether they should be imposed. It asks under what conditions efficiency considerations justify that individuals are forced to pay...

This paper analyzes the effect of spillovers and congestion of local public goods on the segregative properties of endogenous formation of jurisdiction. Households living in the same place form a jurisdiction and produce a local public good, that creates positive spillovers in other...

As representatives of nation-states in global financial markets, sovereign wealth funds (SWFs) share a common form and many functions. Arguably their form and functions owe as much to a shared (global) moment of institutional formation as they owe their form and functions to the hegemony of...

We investigate the computational complexity of several decision problems in hedonic coalition formation games and demonstrate that attaining stability in such games remains NP-hard even when they are additive. Precisely, we prove that when either core stability or strict core stability is under...