How quickly do firms respond to new institutions? Romanian survey data permits investigation of this question, using variables summarizing firms' strategies on transactional governance. These variables are regressed on the factors that should determine efficient behavior according to standard...

The paper proposes a methodology to obtain evidence on the relative importance of different mechanisms for supporting agreements. A survey question posed to company directors summarizes key aspects of mechanisms and asks for judgments on use. In contrast to existing approaches, the data covers...

A fundamental question in economic development is how societies first acquire a successful set of institutions. To examine this question, the paper focuses on a paradigmatic example, England in the years surrounding the Glorious Revolution of 1688. North and Weingast (1989) view the...

Prepared for The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics, 2nd Edition, this essay examines the evolution of both institutions and economists' thinking on institutions during transition. Early in transition, institutions were virtually ignored in the majority of normative prescriptions, but were...

We examine how Russian enterprises do business with one another, focusing on the strategies used to obtain efficiency and predictability in their transactions. Using survey data, the paper analyzes the relative importance of relational contracting, self-enforcement, enterprise networks, private...

Organized legal professions are typically viewed by economists as rent-seeking interest groups. Starting from the observation that the legal professions have been central in institutional development in countries with the highest quality institutions, we add a different perspective, developing a...

We revisit the ubiquitous claim that aiding civil society improves institutional outcomes. In our model, a vibrant civil society initiates public debate in a reform process that would otherwise be dominated by partisan interest groups and politicians. By altering the incentives of interest...

Although a common institutional arrangement, self-regulation as an alternative to direct government regulation has received relatively little attention from economists. This paper uses a framework inspired by property rights theory to analyze the allocation of regulatory authority. In a model of...

Prepared for the Handbook Of New Institutional Economics, this chapter focuses on how the NIE has been used to understand transition and how the experience of transition can help inform the NIE. It first shows that the NIE, as an analytical tool, hardly played any role at all in early...

We offer a new perspective on the effect of relationship-specific investment on contract complexity, which has broad implications because complex contracts and vertical integration are substitutes. A simple model using transaction cost economics (TCE) predicts that buyer and seller...