The paper investigates the question whether constitutions are a proxy for institutional quality. It provides a discussion of institutions and states that constitutions are an example of a formal institution. As any other formal institution, constitutions are also influenced by countries'...

Few studies on federalism analyze the role of courts as safeguards of the federal arrangement, and those that do tend to be too optimistic about what courts can do. This article analyzes the effect of judicial review on the interaction between the central and a regional government in a...

Although democracy is today the most common form of government, the Law and Economics literature has neglected for a long time the role of social preferences in lawmaking. This article aims at capturing the endogenous process of lawmaking: in democracies, people partly determine the law they...