The doctrine of nonintervention, a staple of traditional international law, provides that each state should refrain from interfering in the domestic affairs of other states. This prohibition includes not only military intervention, but also, in Hersh Lauterpacht’s formulation, all...

The level of economic development and the path taken to sustain such development are invariably deterministic of chosen forms of governance, and the political realities that inform them. The literature on political economy is near unanimity on this claim, especially as it pertains the...

On July 17, 1998, one hundred and twenty countries adopted a treaty in Rome to establish a permanent International Criminal Court in The Hague, Netherlands.1 This treaty is the culmination of decades of advocacy by leading human rights advocates around the world to establish an international...

The traditional arena of human rights discourse and practice made little or no allowance for the rapidly growing international phenomenon of bureaucratic corruption.1 In the recent past, states have consistently maintained that bureaucratic corruption, on the basis of the norm of...

The abysmal economic performance by African States in the past three decades is attributable to a host of known factors – mismanagement of resources, graft, and bureaucratic corruption (Mauro, 1995); but of all the known culprits that have so far suppressed economic growth, none are more...

Several recent papers argue that contracts provide reference points that affect ex post behavior. We test this hypothesis in a canonical buyer-seller relationship with renegotiation. Our paper provides causal experimental evidence that an initial contract has a highly significant and...

We present an international trade model with multiproduct firms. Firms are heterogeneously endowed with two types of capabilities that jointly determine the trade-off within firms between managing a large portfolio of products and producing at low marginal cost. The model can explain many of the...

This paper reports data from a laboratory experiment on two-period moral hazard problems. The findings corroborate the contract-theoretic insight that even though the periods are technologically unrelated, due to incentive considerations principals can benefit from offering long-term contracts...

We study a continuous-time game of strategic experimentation in which the players try to assess the failure rate of some new equipment or technology. Breakdowns occur at the jump times of a Poisson process whose unknown intensity is either high or low. In marked contrast to existing models, we...

We study endogenous group formation in tournaments employing experimental three-player contests. We find that players in endogenously formed alliances cope better with the moral hazard problem in groups than players who are forced into an alliance. Also, players who are committed to expending...