After long suffering from benign neglect if not outright contempt, industrial policy is almost fashionable again. The global financial and economic crisis known as the Great Recession has forced researchers and policy makers to confront the reality that market forces alone generally do not lead...

This paper is an attempt to broaden economic discourse by importing insights into human behavior not just from psychology, but also from sociology and anthropology. Whereas the concept of the decision-maker in standard economics is the rational actor and, in early work in behavioral economics,...

An earlier paper showed that an economy could be trapped in an equilibrium state in which the absence of the rule of law led to asset-stripping, and the prevalence of asset-stripping led to the absence of a demand for the rule of law, highlighting a coordination failure. This paper looks more...

How does the lack of legitimacy of property rights affect the dynamics of the creation of the rule of law? The authors investigate the demand for the rule of law in post-communist economies after privatization under the assumption that theft is possible, that those who have "stolen" assets...

In an earlier paper, the authors presented a mathematical exposition of a theory that demonstrated that mass privatization without institutions to limit asset-stripping may not lead to a demand for the rule of law ["After the Big Bang? Obstacles to the Emergence of the Rule of Law in...

As the Eurozone crisis drags on, it is evident that a part of the problem lies in the architecture of debt and its liabilities within the Eurozone and, more generally, the European Union. This paper argues that a large part of the problem can be mitigated by permitting appropriately-structured...

This essay is about an important area in which there has been major rethinking -- industrial policy, by which the authors mean government policies directed at affecting the economic structure of the economy. The standard argument was that markets were efficient, so there was no need for...