German public sector wage restraint has been explained through the presence of a specific type of inter-sectoral wage coordination in the industrial relations system – i.e., export sector-led pattern bargaining. This paper has a twofold ambition. First, as a literature-assessing exercise, I...

Public investment spending declined steadily in advanced economies during the last three decades. Germany is a case in point where the aggregate decline coincided with growing inequality in investments across districts. What explains variation in local investment spending? We assembled a novel...

State concerns about crime and security issues have strongly affected conceptions of economic action outside the law, a traditional field of research in sociology. This increasing encroachment by policy-related concerns on the intellectual framework of the discipline has led, on one hand, to an...

An effect of the informalization of production and distribution processes affecting the garment industry has been the spread of sweatshops in areas of industrial eclipse. Whilst the proliferation of these economies is usually analyzed as an outcome of sweeping macro trends, such as the...

Although illicit exchange has also been an organized, silent, and ever-present response to harsh economic crisis, only protest and social movements have captured scholars' attention. In order to fill this void, this paper analyzes the emergence of illegal markets under situations of social...

Weakness is a quality frequently ascribed to Latin American states. This diagnosis proves faulty since it is possible to find resistant structures inside those states that perpetuate such weaknesses. This article shows that this is the case in regards to the police force of the province of...

A growing body of research, based on large-scale international comparisons, has associated socioeconomic development with several intervening factors, such as levels of respect for social norms, interpersonal trust, degrees of confidence in public institutions, or incidence of corruption in...

The legal order is the legitimate foundation of liberal democracy. Its incomplete enforcement of the law can therefore appear dysfunctional, reflecting weak institutions, state capture, and corrupt practices. This paper casts doubt on such categorical assessments by systematically examining the...

Most workers in the developing world do not receive the benefits they are legally entitled to. Why, then, is there so little public enforcement? This paper argues that this is partly because of a lack of an autonomous and professional bureaucracy. Using a novel dataset with objective measures of...