The Basle Accord of 1988 regulates how much equity banks must set aside as a cushion against the default risk. In its 1999 proposal for a new Accord, the Basle Committee seeks to introduce different equity ratios for customers of different risk levels. The proposal strongly favors external...

Law and economics in Germany was dominated by regulation, competition, and ?German Ordnungspolitik? until the early 1970s. Since then, German scholars have published a broad body of work in German and in the English language, covering fields like contract law, environmental law, labor law,...

Banks often have to determine the credit worthiness, i.e. the ability to repay the loan, of their customers ex-ante. According to the theory of imperfect diagnosis, it can be rational not to use an informative diagnosis result, even though it can be acquired without costs. We call this...

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that, all else being equal, for the case of Italy, tourist areas tend to have a greater amount of crime than non-tourist areas in the long run. Following the literature of the economics of crime à la Becker (1968) and Ehrlich (1973) and using a system...

This paper outlines the foundations of corporate governance. The discussion includes a review on the modern corporation, transaction costs theory, agency costs theory, legal investor protection, investor protection by corporate governance and its various mechanisms, as well as an overview of the...

The dominance of English common-law countries in prospects for financial development in the legal-origins debate has been debunked by recent findings. Using exchange rate regimes and economic/monetary integration oriented hypotheses, this paper proposes an "inflation uncertainty theory" in...

This paper examines the big questions of African comparative politics. It assesses the interaction of three crucial components in the development of the continent: law, democracy and quality of government. Political regimes of democracy, polity and autocracy are instrumented with income-levels,...

Memory is important, also for Economics. The ephemeris can be used not only as moments of who relives the past in a single-rewind-perspective but of those who use these occasions to reflect on the past and to project the future from it. 1995 was a special year for fisheries in Portugal. Never...

In recent decades, women's participation in the labor market has increased considerably in most countries and is converging toward the participation rate of men. Though on a lesser scale, a similar movement toward gender convergence seems to be occurring in the criminal world, though many more...

Originally, behavioral law and economics was an exercise in exploring the implications of key findings from behavioral economics (and psychology) for the analysis and reform of legal institutions. Yet as the new discipline matures, it increasingly replaces foreign evidence by fresh evidence,...