We assess the credit market impact of allowing mortgage "strip-down" as a foreclosure-prevention measure, where strip-down reduces the principal of underwater residential mortgages to the current market value of the property for homeowners in Chapter 13 bankruptcy. Our identification is provided...

Individuals with extensive debt may be granted debt relief in court. We provide a comprehensive evaluation of the Danish debt relief program with data from court records linked to nationwide register data. Using event-study methods and quasi-random assignment of applicants to court trustees with...

It has been argued that procedural formalism undermines economic efficiency by fostering rent-seeking and corruption. We challenge this view by arguing that a number of judicial procedures foster economic growth by increasing the predictability of court decisions, which leads to more...

What are the long-term effects of Communism on economically relevant notions such as social trust? To answer this question, we use the reunification of Germany as a natural experiment and study the post-reunification trajectory of convergence with regard to individuals' trust and risk, as well...

While the direct impact of geographic endowments on prosperity is present in all countries, in former colonies, geography has also affected colonization policies and, therefore, institutional outcomes. Using non-colonized countries as a control group, I re-examine the theories put forward by La...

Multinational enterprises are often accused to have a preference for investing in countries in which the working populations' civil and political rights are largely disregarded. This paper presents an empirical investigation of the popular political repression boosts FDI hypothesis and arrives...

Rational politicians are interested in judicial independence (JI) in order to make their promises credible. But if politicians preferences deviate from the dicta of the judiciary, they also have incentives to renege on judicial independence. These two conflicting aspects are measured by two...

International comparisons of labour market institutions and their transfer across boundaries have gained in importance. The paper deals with the question of the best way to proceed in making such comparisons. At the same time the question of the possibilities and limits to institutional transfer...

Recent adoption of competition laws across the globe has highlighted the importance of institutional considerations for antitrust effectiveness and the need for comparative institutional analyses of antitrust that extend beyond matters of substantive law. Contributing to the resulting nascent...

We develop and empirically test a theory concerning individual beliefs about whether immigrants should culturally assimilate into the host society or preserve their own cultural norms. We argue that when national identity is a source of intrinsic utility, the longevity of national identity...