Nuclear reactors entail massive non-transferrable site-specific investments. The resulting appropriable quasi-rents offer the mob the ideal target. In exchange for large fees, it can either promise to "protect" the utility (and silence the reactor's local opponents) or "extort" from it (and...

Nuclear reactors entail massive non-transferrable site-specific investments. The resulting appropriable quasi-rents offer the mob the ideal target. In exchange for large fees, it can either promise to "protect" the utility (and silence the reactor's local opponents) or "extort" from it (and...

Verifiable proxies for social capital potentially provide an empirically tractable way to identify environments where social norms both constrain behavior and substitute for judicial enforcement. Using regression and factor analysis with Japanese prefecture-level data, I explore several aspects...

Are litigation rates higher where social capital is low? Using prefecture-level data, I ask whether Japanese in communities with high levels of "social capital" more readily settle their divorce and traffic accident disputes out-of-court. Although litigation rate studies often measure suits per...