Using a survey of new firms in Poland, Romania, and Slovakia, I explore how an entrepreneur’s social networks affect the amount paid in bribes to government officials. Lower levels of bribe payments are associated with ownership by a former manager of a state-owned enterprise (SOE), with being...

This paper revisits the tragedy of the commons when agents have different capabilities in both production and encroachment activities, and can allocate their time between them. Under fairly general assumptions on production and encroachment technologies, an individual's expected income is convex...

The belief that elections reduce rent seeking by government officials is widely held, likewise the belief that rent seeking decreases as elections are less subject to corruption. In this paper we develop and test a model in which these beliefs are carefully examined. Our model indicates that,...

This article reviews the current state of research on education externalities. It finds that much of the confusion regarding their magnitude results from conceptual misunderstandings about their nature. The concepts of 'education', 'teaching', and 'knowledge' need to be distinguished for a...

This paper develops a property rights perspective on the nature of the firm. The basic idea is that learning by doing in production and coordination stem from experience in production and that user rights over productive assets are necessary in order to accumulate the experience needed to...

This paper presents an integrated overview of the literature linking institutions, financial development and economic growth. From the large body of research on institutional development, the paper first selects those contributions that make it possible to study the role of institutional...

Scholars and policymakers prescribe legal titling to improve prospects for economic development and political order. However, a public choice literature exists that has long recognized that self-governance often works well and that the state may not be able to improve upon local economic...

Over the past decade, the Peruvian government has issued property titles to over 1.2 million urban households, the largest government titling program targeted to urban squatters in the developing world. This paper examines the labor market effects of increases in tenure security resulting from...

The recent moves of the Indian economy towards further opening up of the economy with less government control has brought about changes in its policy structure. The objective of this study is to test the hypothesis that greater economic freedom leads to higher levels of economic growth in a...

Having a title to land can be associated with increased farm output for two distinct reasons. On the one hand, access to credit may require the use of land, to which there is secure title, as collateral. The classical channel through which title affects output, however, is by increasing the...