In this paper we deal with the relationship between the intervention of a development NGO or an external donor and the performance of village organizations (local NGOs) in Developing Countries. We utilize a large dataset of village organizations in rural areas of Senegal and Burkina Faso. We...

A frequent characteristic of worker cooperatives is the tendency to reinvest a large share of profits into asset locks: a common fund, indivisible and not appropriable by members, neither upon quitting, nor at the end of the firms life. To explain this behaviour, I introduce the hypothesis that...

This paper systematizes the results of the empirical literature on development non-governmental organizations (NGOs), drawing both from quantitative and qualitative analyses, and constructs a set of basic facts about these organizations. These basic facts concern the size of the development NGO...

In this paper we provide a critical assessment on how agent based models (ABMs) may improve and extend the traditional theoretical approaches on the origin and evolution of property rights, namely the economics of property rights and the evolutionary game models on contest behavior. We contend...

Many scholars of common pool resources discovered that institutions may solve the tragedy of the commons. I will address a particular situation of management of natural resources: that of a protected area. In this situation interests differ. Local rural inhabitants care about the quality of...

Countries, under the label of participatory conservation. This implies the direct involvement of the local communities in conservation. We develop an economic model to explain why participatory conservation has been “invented”, why in many situations it does not function, and why...

We argue that in a capitalist enterprise the need to fix wages is crucially influenced by the asymmetric distribution of decision-making power, which can entail the use of private information and authority in favour of the strongest contractual party (the employer), and against the weaker...

The standard explanation of wage rigidity in principal agent and in efficiency wage models is related to worker risk-aversion. However, these explanations do not consider at least two important classes of empirical evidence: (1) In worker cooperatives workers appear to behave in a less risk...