June 12, 1997 <p> Existing works on the economic implications of social structures examined the effect of intra-community information and contract enforcement institutions on personal exchange among that community's members. In contrast, this paper examines the extent to which common knowledge...</p>

July 11, 1995 <p>In contrast to recent work in Regional Economics which emphasizes the role of an industry's scale in generating agglomeration economies, this paper emphasizes the importance of an industry's composition, that is, the number of firms generating agglomeration economies. As most...</p>

November 5, 1997 <p> This paper presents a micro-level historical and theoretical analysis of Genoa's economic and political history during the twelfth and thirteenth century by examining the factors influencing the extent to which its political system was self-enforcing and their change over time....</p>

First draft: August 20, 1996 <p>This draft: June 25, 1997 <p> This paper surveys the small, yet growing, literature that employs game theory for economic history analysis. It elaborates on the promise and challenge of integrating game theoretical and economic history analyses and presents the...</p></p>

It is widely believed that current disparities in economic, political, and social outcomes reflect distinct institutions. Institutions are invoked to explain why some countries are rich and others poor, some democratic and others dictatorial. But arguments of this sort gloss over the question of...

Edwards and Ogilvie (2008) dispute the empirical basis for the view (Greif, e.g., 1989, 1994, 2006) that multilateral reputation mechanism mitigated agency problems among the eleventh-century Maghribi traders. They assert that the relations among merchants and agents were law-based. This paper...