We analyse policy makers' incentives to fight corruption under different institutional qualities. We find that 'public officials', even when non-corrupt, significantly distort anti-corruption institutions by choosing a lower detection probability when this probability applies to their own...

This paper studies whether institutions matter for economic performance. For this aim, we first construct a simple framework illustrating how to examine the interaction between institutions and economic performance from a different point of view. Then, using this framework, we introduce an...

We study information conditions under which individuals are willing to delegate their sanctioning power to a central authority. We design a public goods game in which players can move between institutional environments, and we vary the observability of others' contributions. We find that the...

The paper reviews the current discussion on institutional change and institutional entrepreneurship. Specifically, it focuses on institutional change agents, by which we mean individuals whose actions can be shown to have contributed to formal or informal institutional change, to the benefit of...

This study assesses the relationship between tribalism (the tribalism index) and government effectiveness (per the World Bank) in 65 countries using cross-sectional data averages from 2000-2010. This study finds that countries with high-tribal populations generally enjoy bad governance in terms...

Along with political and economic changes, the fall of the socialist regimes in Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union brought about fundamental institutional reforms. Several studies have examined the causes of the increasing unhappiness which accompanied the transition process,...

We relate the design of contract law to the process of development. In this paper, contract law defines which private agreements are enforceable (i.e. are binding and enforced by courts) and which are not. Specically, we consider an economy where agents face a hold-up problem (moral hazard in...

Using firm-level data from nine developing countries we demonstrate that (a) certain institutions like restrictive labour market regulations that are considered to be bad for economic growth might be beneficial for production efficiency, whereas (b) good business environment which is considered...

Recently, Aoki proposed the concept of substantive institutions which relates outcomes of strategic interaction with public representations of equilibrium states of games. I argue that the Aoki model can be grounded in theories of distributed cognition and performativity, which I put into the...

In this work I combine the individualistic approach of economic theory with the social view of other social sciences to study corruption and the role of institutions and monitoring agencies when corruption takes place in a network structure. I will try to prove that if the social network is...