To understand leadership, it is necessary to understand the purpose of an organization. Organizations are hierarchies with leaders at the top. Why do we have leaders instead of an algorithm making decisions? The theory of the firm recognizes benefits to centralizing authority but these...

Countries are not equally developed in large part because most countries face sets of property rights that do not foster growth despite the aggregate gains that would result from changing property rights. The difference in rents to society between the extant set of property rights and some...

The New Institutional Economics (NIE) has its early roots in Cliometrics. Cliometrics began with a focus on using neoclassical theory to develop and test hypotheses in economic history. But empirical consideration of economic and political development within and across countries is limited,...

We explore the long run impact of the Spanish missions on Native American outcomes in the early 20th century. Native communities who interacted with Spanish missionaries developed into enclaves which blended Catholicism with native culture. Some survived assaults on their property rights by...

While most contemporary historians agree that the use of debt peonage as a coercive labor contract in Mexico was not widespread, scholars still concur that it was important and pervasive in Yucatan state during the henequen boom of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The henequen boom...

Alexander Gerschenkron understood the development of backward countries as a contextual process that varied from country to country depending on which perquisites were present or absent. In the past twenty years, Brazilian agriculture evolved from "backward" to an agricultural powerhouse. Its...

Understanding and minimizing the transaction costs of policy implementation are critical for reducing tropical forest losses. As the international community prepares to launch REDD+, a global initiative to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from tropical deforestation, policymakers need to pay...

We extend the literature on interest group behavior and policy outcomes by examining how groups with limited resources (votes and campaign contributions) effectively influence government by manipulating media information to voters. Voters in turn lobby politicians to implement the group's...

Tenancy has been a means for labor to advance their socio-economic condition in agriculture yet in Brazil and Latin America, tenancy rates are low compared to the U.S. and the OECD countries. We test for the importance of insecure property rights in Brazil on the reluctance of landowners to rent...

We present a conceptual framework to better understand the interaction between settlement and the emergence of de facto property rights on frontiers prior to governments establishing and enforcing de jure property rights. In this framework, potential rents associated with more exclusivity drives...