Despite the absence of formal institutions to constrain opportunistic behavior, some autocracies successfully attract private investment. Prior work explains such success by the relative size of the autocrat's winning coalition or the existence of legislatures. We advance on this understanding...

Strong financial markets are widely thought to propel economic development, with many in finance seeing legal tradition as fundamental to protecting investors sufficiently for finance to flourish. Kenneth Dam, in the Law-Growth Nexus, finds that the legal tradition view inaccurately portrays how...

Why do some democracies persist while others break down? Some studies have suggested that economic development decreases the likelihood of authoritarian reversal, which is consistent with Milton Friedman's argument that economic freedom is necessary for political freedom. An empirical...

A key theoretical and methodological issue for comparative scholars concerns the non-identical nature of actors across different institutional contexts. This paper reviews the relationship between actors and institutions within various strands of institutional theory, showing some emerging...

The Austrian contribution to the development of law and economics is the study of endogenous rule formation, or the spontaneous evolution of social institutions, which can be traced to the founder of the Austrian School, Carl Menger. While Menger's emphasis on spontaneous institutional analysis...

We propose a new history-friendly approach to evolutionary socio-economic dynamics based around competition between five ‘utopias', as central ideas about which to order society: capitalism, socialism, democracy, nature, and nationalism (Montgomery and Chirot 2015). In our model, citizens...

This paper argues that the traditional societal contract that underlies the market economy has run its course and needs to be replaced by a new contract, based on a new conception of the "empowering economy." Whereas different societal contracts are relevant to different societies, there must be...

This paper argues that the traditional social contract that underlies the free market economy has run its course and needs to be replaced by a new contract, based on a new conception of the “empowering economy.” Whereas different social contracts are relevant to different societies, all...

Anarchy and the Law assembles for the first time in one volume the most important classic and contemporary studies exploring and debating non-state legal and political systems, especially involving the tradition of natural law and private contracts. Should markets and contracts provide law, and...

What explains cross-national differences in the fiscal impact of government, including the size of the welfare state? Standard explanations center on citizen and government ideology and ethnic heterogeneity, with a smaller role for institutions such as majoritarianism, presidentialism, and...