The world's predominantly Muslim countries have long been underdeveloped. This paper classifies, critiques, and extends the mechanisms that have been proposed as explanations for the pattern. One mechanism involves the use of Islam to legitimize worldviews that served vested interests. Another...

The paper examines the questions of how nonterritorial feudal governments in medieval central Europe emerged and what their tasks were, of how competition between these governments functioned, and of what consequences it had. The analysis leads to three hypotheses: (1) governmental...

Prior to the 19th century virtually all European civil appointments were made through outright sale or patronage, and the offices were effectively private property. During the first half of the 19th century almost all of these offices converted to professional bureaucracies with salaried...

A fundamental question of economic and technological history is why some civilizations adopted new and important technologies and others did not. In this paper, we construct a simple political-economy model that suggests that rulers may not accept a productivity-enhancing technology when it...

Very little principal-agent analysis has been done within the fisheries economic literature. This paper conducts a principal-agent analysis of fisheries. Within a standard principal-agent model, the low-cost agent must be allowed the same level of effort as under complete information. This...

The paper investigates the incentives created by environmental policy instruments to adopt cleaner technology. In a framework with many asymmetric firms we show that, if the regulator has committed to a certain aggregate emission level before the new technology was available, taxes lead to...

In several landmark cases, the European Court of Justice has ruled that member states of the European Union are liable for damages caused by an infringement of European Law if the violation is sufficiently serious. This article analyses the incentive effects of liability rules on member states...

The decision to cooperate within R&D joint ventures is often based on expert advice. Such advice typically originates in a due-diligence process, which assesses the R&D joint venture's profitability, for example, by appraising the achievability of synergies. We show that if the experts who...

Decisions about intervention can be understood as decisions about tolerance, because an act of tolerance is an act of nonintervention, and, conversely, an act of intervention can be understood as an act of intolerance. But acts of tolerance, typically made under conditions of epistemic...

Although competition law and intellectual property have overlapping economic rationales, they frequently conflict. One area of conflict is vertical leveraging. This paper analyzes recent legislation and court decisions dealing with vertical leveraging. The main conclusion is that two policy...