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...

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...

Most moral justifications for coercion have been based on one of two arguments: the consent of the coerced, usually understood as univariate and discrete, or the beneficial consequences of coercion; but many cases do not fit these categories. This paper proposes that consent be understood as our...

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...

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...

This paper tests the explanatory power of alternative theories on the determinants of judiciary independence using annual and decision-based data on the Italian Constitutional Court. The estimates show that structural measures of judiciary independence, such as the share of constitutional judges...

This paper highlights the crucial role of the state in establishing a market economy, through an analysis of the early stages of market-oriented reforms in China. China followed an evolutionary approach to economic reform that has relied on the preexisting state to oversee the construction of a...

We consider a principal-multiagent framework with adverse selection when contracting is possible ex ante. However, enforcement of contracts is imperfect, which results in inefficiencies. We study how group contracting may or may not mitigate those inefficiencies.

Within the framework of the generalized Wittman-Roemer model of political competition, this article provides a canonical example showing that political parties may matter in explaining how redistribution policies change with respect to changes in inequality. Some authors (Lee and Roemer, 2005;...

We present a game-theoretic model of political discourse that explores how strategic incentives to make potentially persuasive arguments vary across different informational contexts. We show that political sophistication of the listeners fundamentally affects the speakers' incentives to make...