Governments may draft contracts with market agents for allocating subsidies and pursuing specific policy goals. Contract enforcement via binding commitments is difficult, however, when exogenous (environmental) and endogenous (behavioural) risks interact. Analyzing the old debt compromise in...

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that, all else being equal, for the case of Italy, tourist areas tend to have a greater amount of crime than non-tourist areas in the long run. Following the literature of the economics of crime à la Becker (1968) and Ehrlich (1973) and using a system...

This paper studies the concept of an international economic order, i.e. an institutional arrangement of international rules. Such rules emerge from negative experiences – historical disasters – that inflict severe hardship on people. A taxonomy for rules reducing transaction costs is...

This paper analyzes how international rules are established and stabilized, i.e. how an international institutional order develops. Rules emerge mainly through learning from negative experience and serve to reduce transaction costs. The paper looks at mechanisms that stabilize rule systems, at...

Woman suffrage led to one of the greatest enfranchisements in history. Yet, women neither won the right to vote by force, nor did men grant it under the imminent threat of female unrest. These facts are difficult to reconcile with leading political economy theories of suffrage extensions. In...