This paper empirically compares civil procedure in common-law and civil-law countries. Using World-Bank and hand-collected data, and unlike earlier studies that used predecessor data sets, this paper finds no systematic differences between common- and civil-law countries in the complexity,...

Comparative law and finance quantifies differences in the laws governing the business enterprise in various countries. The resulting data can be used to test which legal institutions (if any) matter for financial development. Until recently only cross-sectional data were available. We report the...

The modern state has monopolized the legitimate use of force. This concept is twofold. First, the state is empowered with enforcement rights; second, the rights of the individuals are restricted. In a simple model of property rights with appropriation and defense activity, we show that a...

Conventional arguments suggest that republics ought to grow faster than monarchies and experience lower transitional costs following reforms. We employ a panel of 27 countries observed from 1820 to 2000 to estimate these differences. Results show no significant growth differences between the two...

This paper argues that the human species has two natural coordination mechanisms: leadership and fairness. A leader who ignores fairness when coordinating the behavior of a large organization risks creating the conditions for the emergence of a destabilizing subgroup that is able to coalesce...

I examine the work of POLANYI [1957] to extract from it hypotheses related to the emergence and operation of the capitalist system. I adapt models from the literature on complex adaptive systems and evolutionary game theory to build a fictitious society in which I "test" those hypotheses. The...

The paper is intended to provide a broad overview of the field of corporate governance, and to integrate recent research. Corporate governance is viewed from the perspective of the agency costs involved in obtaining equity investment from minority outside stockholders in a firm controlled by...

Witnesses often gain by slanting testimony. Courts try to elicit the truth with perjury rules. Perjury is not truth-revealing; truth revelation is, however, possible. With a truth-revealing mechanism the judge will get little testimony because the defendant will not present witnesses with...

There is extensive literature on whether courts or legislators produce efficient rules, but which of them produces rules efficiently? The law is subject touncertainty ex ante; uncertainty makes the outcomes of trials difficult to predict and deters parties from settling disputes out of court. In...

This paper proposes a theoretical analysis of final-offer arbitration in which disputants may be represented by lawyers who can be paid by flat, contingent, or conditional fees. We derive the equilibrium lawyers' efforts to defend their clients and the equilibrium parties' proposals made to the...