In the European political discourse, the potentially vast economic benefits derived from the European Union are taken for granted. In the academic debate, these economic benefits, even if measured in terms of GDP per capita growth, are much less consensual. There are severe methodological...

We discuss the contribution of autocratic tendencies in democratically elected political leaders to the economic growth of developed economies. To this end, we exploit the unique election of Sir Charles Court as state premier of Western Australia in 1975 to estimate the contribution of...

The Synthetic Control Method has become a widely used tool in estimating the causal impact of policies, shocks and interventions of interest on economic and social outcomes. The technique has become particularly popular in estimating the effect of these shocks on a single treated unit. As a...

Legislation enabling courts to confiscate or remove illegal gain has grown rapidly across a wide range of countries within both civil and common law systems. We review these developments from an economic perspective and show that there are certain types of offence for which the removal of...

The austerity policies pursued in several countries during the Eurozone crisis began to call attention to the role played by courts as relevant actors in the context of budgetary and financial policies. The case of the Portuguese Constitutional Court has often been singled out in national and...

This article examines the importance of institutional shocks for long-run development with an application to the Iranian revolution. Our empirical method offers a clear test to distinguish between three models of institutional change. We define gradual institutional change without a major shock,...

In this paper we investigate empirically the determinants of judicial behavior at the Philippine Supreme Court in the period 1986-2010. Our results show some alignment between individual Justices and the interests of the presidential appointers, although it varies across presidential terms. We...

This paper offers a theory to explain cross-national variation in administrative law doctrines and practices. Administrative law regimes vary along three primary dimensions: the scope of delegation to agencies, agencies’ exercise of discretion, and judicial practices of deference to agencies....

Although highly criticized by legal scholars, plea-bargaining is probably the most transplanted instrument of criminal procedure. In contrast to most of the legal literature, Law and Economics is quite optimistic about it. In this paper, we take the view that such optimism is not well founded....

This paper analyzes the influence of political and institutional factors on the enactment of sentencing guidelines and truth-in-sentencing legislation by US states. First, we develop a model of strategic interaction among the judiciary, parole boards and state legislators, to analyze the...