In an open economy with common property resources at the community level, marriage and migratory decisions crucially depend on inheritance rules on the commons. Motivated by the traditional management of the commons in the Italian Alps, we present a model that fits the evolution of property...

Starting from the medieval period, women in the Italian Alps experienced a progressive erosion in property rights over the commons. We collected documents about the evolution of inheritance regulations on collective land issued by hundreds of peasant communities over a period of six centuries...

The simple trade-off between incentive and risk, which is crucial to the agency problem, is not a sufficient explanation for the ineffectiveness of a specific output-related pay such as the contract system adopted in the US iron and steel industry during the second half of the...

This paper investigates the historical accounts of the ineffectiveness of the contract system in the US iron and steel industry during the second half of the nineteenth-century. The high rate of technological innovation, along with the extensive bargaining power of the old industrial crafts,...

Lliterature on Taylorism has surprisingly ignored the role of its payment systems, while the results achieved on Ford's five-dollar day programme appear contradictory and sometimes isolated from the organisational change simultaneously undertaken. I seek to fill these theoretical gaps. I provide...

The article investigates the equilibrium conditions in the choice between legally binding contracts, which are costly to verify and enforce, and non-binding contracts, which simply rely on trust as an enforcement mechanism, in both one-shot and repeated interactions. The returns to effort appear...

This paper extends the empirical debate on the effects of corruption on environmental degradation by considering a recently available measure of environmental quality, the Environmental Performance Index. This indicator is more comprehensive than the measures of air pollutant emissions commonly...