Economists draw important lessons for modern development from the medieval Maghribi traders who, according to Greif, enforced contracts multilaterally through a closed, private-order ‘coalition’. We show that this view is untenable. The Maghribis used formal legal mechanisms and entered...

Social movements in Hong Kong have begun to challenge the law and the judicial system for the purpose of challenging government policies or at least making their claims highly visible before the public in Hong Kong. the legal boundary of the free space for social movements has been contested in...

The report highlights the following aspects: 1. the inability of the legal system to recognise the unique unequal , 2. position of women; 3. the perception of women as peripheral to economic development by the State and their consequent marginalization and exploitation in the labour force; 4. the...

We analyze the relationship between legal institutions, innovation and growth. We compare a rigid (law set ex-ante) legal system and a flexible one (law set after observing current technology). The flexible system dominates in terms of welfare, amount of innovation and output growth at...

The medieval Champagne fairs are widely used to draw lessons about the institutional basis for long-distance impersonal exchange. This paper re-examines the causes of the outstanding success of the Champagne fairs in mediating international trade, the timing and causes of the fairs’ decline,...

The document presents an analysis, developed under the framework of conflict theory, which models the choice of ownership structure as the result of a power struggle between the owner of a firm and potential shareholders. The theoretical model suggests that, when the system that protects...