The Greek debt crisis prompted EU officials to embark on a radical reconstruction of the European sovereign debt markets. Prominently featured in this reconstruction was a set of contract provisions called Collective Action Clauses, or CACs. CACs are supposed to help governments and private...

This paper examines the economic consequences of political participation by entrepreneurs in China. Using unique data on political participation and initial public offerings by entrepreneurial firms, we find that firms controlled by entrepreneurs who participate in politics exhibit superior...

The sweeping change in political economy associated with the rapid growth of the private sector in China is rarely studied empirically in the economics literature. Using four cross-sectional surveys of private firms between 1995 and 2010, we examine the dynamics of rent creation from Party...

This study addresses the apparent puzzle that China achieved spectacular economic performance despite weak institutions. Using a World Bank survey of 1566 manufacturing enterprises in 18 Chinese cities, we investigated whether property rights protection mattered for enterprise performance. We...

This paper investigates the relationship between the historical process of legal central- ization and increased religious toleration by the state. We develop a model based on the mathematics of mixture distributions which delineates the conditions under which legal centralization raises the...

We find a robust relationship between motor vehicle ownership, its interaction with legal heritage and obesity in OECD countries. Our estimates indicate that an increase of 100 motor vehicles per thousand residents is associated with about a 6% point increase in obesity in common law countries,...

New technologies have not always been greeted with full enthusiasm. Although the Ottomans were quick to adopt advancements in military technology, they waited almost three centuries to sanction printing in Ottoman Turkish (in Arabic characters). Printing spread relatively rapidly throughout...

Advocates claim that voluntary programs can help shore up poorly performing command-and-control environmental regulation in developing countries. Although literature on this issue is quite thin, research on voluntary environmental programs in industrialized countries suggests that they are...

Slavery has been a major institution of labor coercion throughout history. Colonial societies used slavery intensively across the Americas, and slavery remained prevalent in most countries after independence from the European powers. We investigate the impact of slavery on long-run development...

The determinants of incentive regulation are an important issue in economics. More powerful rules relax allocative distortions at the cost of lower rent extraction. Hence, they should be found where the reformer is more concerned with stimulating investments by granting higher expected profits,...