Social capital is defined as mutual trust. It is related to production by a key hypothesis: social capital determines how easily people work together. An easy-to-use proxy (Putnam's Instrument) is the density of voluntary organizations. Social capital might be a new production factor which must...

This chapter reviews the theory of the voluntary public and private redistribution of wealth elaborated by economic analysis in the last forty years or so. The central object of the theory is altruistic gift-giving, construed as benevolent voluntary redistribution of income or wealth. The theory...

Why do lawyers in some jurisdictions continue to ‘automatically’ exclude the 1980 UN Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods (CISG) in their choices of law for international sales contracts? Why do lawyers in other jurisdictions approach the decision very differently? Why...

Aiming to explain the European divide with respect to social and political values, scholars in the past have relied on a simplified four- (or even two-) dimensional regime model which tranches the continent according to the social capacities of its inhabitants. This "cartography" of "Social...

Measurement quality is a fundamental factor in determining the cost of transactions within organizations and markets. A huge gulf separates the meaningfulness and precision of business metrics as currently achieved from the quality that has been routinely obtained for decades in research and in...

Legislative misbehavior is best curbed through rational legislating requirements, whereby legislators must include in the legislative record an explicit elaboration of the path of lawmaking - from evidence, through findings, to ultimate conclusions - that clearly sets out the analytic connection...

The determinants of investment behaviour are essentially preferences, endowments, production possibilities and institutions. While there is a vast literature discussing the effect of different combinations of the latter three dimensions for given preferences, very little research effort has been...

We study the environmental and economic effects of public abatement in the presence of multiple stable steady-state ecological equilibria. Under shallow-lake dynamics (SLD), the isocline for the stock of pollution features two stable branches, a good and a bad one. Assuming that the ecology is...

We study the environmental and economic effects of public abatement in the presence of multiple stable steady-state ecological equilibria. Under shallow-lake dynamics (SLD), the isocline for the stock of pollution features two stable branches, a good and a bad one. Assuming that the ecology is...