We study the importance of technology and institutions in determining the size of markets in five different countries and fifteen different German states. The setting of 19th century Europe presents a unique opportunity to address this issue, since it witnessed fundamental change in both...

The governance and transaction cost insights of Oliver Williamson (1975, 1985, 1996, 2010) and Ronald Coase (1937, 1992) have framed antitrust polices and firm management strategies. Transaction cost economics explain efficient governance adaptation. With a focus on private efficiency gains...

The participation of interest groups in public policy making is unavoidable. Its unavoidable nature is only matched by the universal suspicion with which it has been seen by both policy makers and the public. Recently, however, there has been a growing literature that examines the participation...

Why do inefficient -- non-growth enhancing -- institutions emerge and persist? This paper develops a simple framework to provide some answers to this question. Political institutions determine the allocation of political power, and economic institutions determine the framework for policy-making...

Do societies choose inefficient policies and institutions, in contrast to what would be suggested by a reasoning extending the Coase Theorem to politics? Do societies choose inefficient policies and institutions because of differences in the beliefs and ideologies of their peoples or leaders? Or...

This note describes the unraveling of transaction dates in several markets, including the labor markets for new lawyers hired by large law firms and for gastroenterology fellows, and the market for post-season college football bowls. Together these will illustrate that unraveling can occur in...

We develop a model to understand the incidence of presidential and parliamentary institutions. Our analysis is predicated on two ideas: first, that minorities are relatively powerful in a parliamentary system compared to a presidential system, and second, that presidents have more power with...

We revisit the debate over whether political institutions cause economic growth, or whether, alternatively, growth and human capital accumulation lead to institutional improvement. We find that most indicators of institutional quality used to establish the proposition that institutions cause...

Implementation of workplace policies--whether through enforcement of laws or administration of programs--raises the question of the interaction between institutions created to carry out laws and the activities of workplace based agents that directly (e.g. unions) or indirectly (e.g. insurance...