Several past studies have found health risk to be negatively correlated with the probability of voluntary health insurance. This is contrary to what one would expect from standard textbook models of adverse selection and moral hazard. The two most common explanations to the counter-intuitive...

Property rights are a key aspect of the rules governing economic interactions, providing individuals with dependable information and incentives. Well-defined and stable property rights encourage the effective use of existing scarce resources and also provide the incentive to innovate. In this...

With the collapse of communism in the late 1980s the field of comparative political economy has undergone major revision. Socialism is no longer considered the viable alternative to capitalism it once was. We now recognize that the choice is between alternative institutional arrangements of...

While both errors of overoptimism and errors of overpessimism are possible in the face of imperfect information, the presence of option value from deferring a decision to exchange causes trader errors to be overpessimistically biased. This is problematic because unlike errors of overoptimism,...

This paper investigates the internal governance institutions of violent criminal enterprise by examining the law, economics, and organization of pirates. To effectively organize their banditry, pirates required mechanisms to prevent internal predation, minimize crew conflict, and maximize...

This paper investigates the internal governance institutions of violent criminal enterprise by examining the law, economics, and organization of pirates. To effectively organize their banditry, pirates required mechanisms to prevent internal predation, minimize crew conflict, and maximize...

Is it possible to trade with bandits? When government is absent the superior strength of some agents makes it cheaper for them to violently steal what they desire from weaker agents than to use trade to obtain what they want. Such was the case with middlemen who interacted with producers in late...

Institutionally dependent payoffs determine the direction of entrepreneurial alertness and efforts. In order to understand the plight of developing countries, it is critical to understand that it is not a lack of entrepreneurship that is the problem, but rather the institutional context...

Self-enforcing arrangements are crucial to the study of African political econmy. The weakness of formal governance in much of Africa makes understanding informal institutions of cooperation particularly important. I consider the application of self-enforcing arrangements, like those described...