"This theme paper focuses on political institutions and their effects on social choice. Institutions are argued to play a mediating rolebetween the preferences of individuals and social choices. In addition to playing an endogenous role in molding and channeling preferences, institutions...

"While the conditions of production give some guidance to what factor groupings are desirable ceteris paribus, they do not determine the boundaries of a neoclassical firm (a legal entity with a residual claimant). Indeed, they could just as well be related to other groupings, such as...

"The classical economists were primarily engaged in analysis of the wonder that is production. The marginalists, while laying the foundation of mathematical economics, shifted its focus to rational behavior of a single consumer, presumably because there they found a problem readily amenable to...

"We are concerned here with the creation of non-market institutions for reducing the cost of risk in poor agrarian societies that operate at low levels of technology without the benefits of insurance, credit and other intertemporal markets. 1 Institutions, the formal and informal rules that...

This dissertation involves two set of papers. The first chapter contains a brief introduction of the issues covered in this thesis. In the first set of papers (chapters 2 and 3) I investigate the use of product standards in international trade. Product standards relate to restrictions on the...

This dissertation explores the role of efficiency of redistributive institutions (ERI)on redistribution. The first substantive essay proposes a theoretical model to explain thelack of strong empirical evidence in favor of a positive relationship between incomeinequality and redistribution. This...