Political scientists and economists increasingly agree that institutions may influence economic growth, but there is little general agreement on what institutions tend to produce what consequences. We apply public choice insights for a theoretical analysis that may be termed “Madisonian”:...

The paper analyzes European integration from a constitutional economics perspective. It is argued that the use of the Prisoners' Dilemma as a description of the advantages of European integration is fallacious. If the situation is a PD, the solution is impossible; if it is not, it is unnecessary.

This article investigates the analytical line of reasoning in D. North’s, J. Wallis’ and B. Weingast’s research project “Violence and Social Orders”, which unifies in an institutional explanation scheme the control over violence in human societies, the equilibrium of interests among...

Taxing small deposits used to be a taboo in European politics – but why? This contribution re-assesses the protection of small deposits from an angle that has not received much attention in the current debate: the politico-philosophical, ordo-liberal, and social-political perspectives, arguing...

This paper explores the rise of the fiscal state in the early modern period and its impact on legal capacity. To measure legal capacity, we establish that witchcraft trials were more likely to take place where the central state had weak legal insti- tutions. Combining data on the geographic...

Zak & Knack (2001) demonstrate that interpersonal trust substantially impacts economic growth, and that sufficient interpersonal trust is necessary for economic development. To investigate the ability of policy-makers to affect trust levels, this paper builds a formal model characterizing public...

What do China, Estonia, Germany, India, Chile, South Korea and Slovakia all have in common? They have all enacted free-market reforms, and have seen their inhabitants’ living standards soar as a result. This essay describes how free-market policies have improved economic performance in these...

Italian Abstract: Con questo saggio intendo fare luce sulla presenza e la rilevanza teoretica dell’idea del buongoverno nel pensiero di Einaudi, attraverso un confronto con il pensiero di Mosca basato su identità e differenze tra le loro concezioni del governo della legge, l'opinione...

Recent research has clearly demonstrated that economic development is closely related to environmental quality. In last two decades this relationship has been described by the Environmental Kuznets Curves that postulates an inverted U-shaped relationship between pollution and income. However,...