Europe is on the threshold of a campaign of imposing more disclosure requirements and costs through company and securities legislation. The following issues led to this European policy: Firstly, the SarbOx adaptation policy was put in place to protect European companies from the SEC's filings...

Beginning in the mid-seventeenth century, England changed its system of raising revenues from tax farming, combined with the granting of monopolies, to direct collection within the government administration. Rents were then transferred from tax farmers and monopolists to the central government...

Borrowing from public choice literature, while aristocratic civil wars can be regarded as anarchy, and the monopoly of violence by the state as Leviathan, duel of honor is an orderly anarchy. The sudden or gradual withering of duel of honor as an institution marks the transition to the monopoly...

Beginning in the second half of the 17th century any deputy could dismiss a session of the Polish-Lithuanian parliament by shouting: I do not allow. This political device came to be known as liberum veto, an unceasing subject of controversy. Historians blame it for the decline and subsequent...

Historical records show that the Sicilian mafia developed to protect land from predatory attacks, at a time when publicly provided security was scarce and banditry widespread. Using a common-agency model, the paper shows that: (i) it is optimal for each landowner to voluntarily buy protection...

This paper contributes to the debate over the unity in Smith's corpus by emphasizing Smith's pervasive methodological approach based on an assumption of self-interest. Specifically, Smith consistently relies on equilibrium arguments to explain why a given pattern of economic, political, or...

What accounts for the differences in the “wealth of nations”; that is, the differing levels of opulence across countries? Adam Smith’s answer is complex and has yet to be fully understood. Moreover, Smith's argument is as relevant today as it was in his time. On the economic side, his...

The characterisation of a security interest as 'fixed' or 'floating' has generated much litigation in English courts. This is because a floating charge is subordinated by statute to other claims in the debtor's insolvency, whereas a fixed charge is not. This paper uses the example of the...

Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations is the most influential work in economics ever written. But it is neither complete nor perfect. Smith's theory of the firm, or the lack thereof, is one of the masterpiece's blind spots. Smith thought history had shown that joint stock companies cannot compete with...

What accounts for the differences in the “wealth of nations”; that is, the differing levels of opulence across countries? Adam Smith's argument is as relevant today as it was in his time. On the economic side, his answer is well-known: the division of labor, the role of capital accumulation,...