In a deregulatory environment, what do regulated firms do? The standard assumption is simple: firms revert to their preregulatory form. This Essay challenges that basic assumption. Increasingly, regulation is conducted through broad standards foisted on firms to implement internally. Congress...

Ethnic heterogeneity influences economic growth through various channels such as efficiency improvement and capital accumulation. However, it is open to discussion exactly how ethnic heterogeneity affects these channels. Hence, this paper attempts to examine the effects of heterogeneity on...

This is the first paper to investigate whether the number of high courts in a country has systematic effects both on the quality of its legal system and on its level of economic development more generally. It is theorized that due to the division of labor and a higher degree of specialization,...

The continuing integration of Europe, the increasing mobility of its citizens and enterprises, and the globalization of the world economy place increasing pressure on Europe's redistributive regulations, taxes, and subsidies. The most attractive response for many European governments is to...

The supposed ubiquity of potential efficiencies is understood to justify permitting most horizontal mergers despite their tendency to raise prices. Yet efficiencies are said to be rarely decisive in actual merger decision-making. Moreover, the economic analysis of merger efficiencies lags far...

There is a large literature that finds that common law countries perform better than civil law countries in various aspects of the institutional environment. The present paper extends these findings to another dimension of institutional quality - the cost of registering property. In a sample of...

One of the biggest problems with modern democracy is that most of the public is usually ignorant about politics and government. Many people understand that their votes are unlikely to change the outcome of an election and don't see the point in learning much about politics. This creates a nation...

We examine the formation of multilateral, hub-and-spoke and bilateral international R&D strategic alliances (overlapping climate clubs) to reduce CO2 emissions. R&D provision in clubs produces two types of positive externalities: a global public good (i.e., reduction of CO2 emissions) and...

Both institutional quality and institutional stability have been argued to stimulate economic growth. But to improve institutional quality, a country must endure a period of institutional change, which implies at least a little and possibly a lot of institutional instability. We investigate the...