Much of the existing literature investigating the relationship between legal regimes and economic growth focuses on the agency problem of aligning judicial incentives with social welfare and is relatively free of institutional detail beyond abstractions about common law and civil code regimes....

This paper analyzes the influence of political and institutional factors on the enactment of sentencing guidelines and truth-in-sentencing legislation by US states. First, we develop a model of strategic interaction among the judiciary, parole boards and state legislators, to analyze the...