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...

"Why do some countries have growth-enhancing financial systems, while others do not? Why have some countries developed the necessary investor protection laws and contract-enforcement mechanisms to support financial institutions and markets, while others have not? This paper reviews existing...

As Africa's role on the global stage is rising, so does the need to understand the shadow of history on the continent's economy and polity. We discuss recent works that shed light on Africa's colonial and precolonial legacies. The emerging corpus is remarkably interdisciplinary. Archives,...

In this essay, we provide a simple conceptual framework to elucidate the forces that lead to institutional persistence and change. Our framework is based on a dynamic game between different groups, who care both about current policies and institutions and future policies, which are themselves...

Despite a large consensus among economists on the strong interdependence and synergy between pro-development institutions, how should one understand why Imperial China, with weaker rule of law and property rights, gave the commoners more opportunities to access elite status than Premodern...

Standard approaches to environmental and natural resource use externalities generally focus on single-sector resources and user groups. Remedies include Pigouvian-style government constraints, small group controls following Elinor Ostrom, or less frequently, bargaining across users as outlined...

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 construct an endogenous growth model that includes a cultural variable along the dimension of individualism-collectivism. The model predicts that more individualism leads to more innovation because of the social rewards associated with innovation in an individualist culture. This cultural...

Katharine Coman's "Some Unsettled Problems of Irrigation," published in March 1911 in the first issue of the American Economic Review addressed issues of water supply, rights, and organization. These same issues have relevance today 100 years later in face of growing concern about the...

An emerging economic literature over the past decade has made use of international tests of educational achievement to analyze the determinants and impacts of cognitive skills. The cross-country comparative approach provides a number of unique advantages over national studies: It can exploit...