Organized legal professions are typically viewed by economists as rent-seeking interest groups. Starting from the observation that the legal professions have been central in institutional development in countries with the highest quality institutions, we add a different perspective, developing a...

Although a common institutional arrangement, self-regulation as an alternative to direct government regulation has received relatively little attention from economists. This paper uses a framework inspired by property rights theory to analyze the allocation of regulatory authority. In a model of...

Prepared for The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics, 2nd Edition, this essay examines the evolution of both institutions and economists' thinking on institutions during transition. Early in transition, institutions were virtually ignored in the majority of normative prescriptions, but were...

We examine how Russian enterprises do business with one another, focusing on the strategies used to obtain efficiency and predictability in their transactions. Using survey data, the paper analyzes the relative importance of relational contracting, self-enforcement, enterprise networks, private...

Prepared for the Handbook Of New Institutional Economics, this chapter focuses on how the NIE has been used to understand transition and how the experience of transition can help inform the NIE. It first shows that the NIE, as an analytical tool, hardly played any role at all in early...

A fundamental question in economic development is how societies first acquire a successful set of institutions. To examine this question, the paper focuses on a paradigmatic example, England in the years surrounding the Glorious Revolution of 1688. North and Weingast (1989) view the...

A methodology is presented for transaction-cost measurement using reports from businesses. In Romania, transaction costs related to buying and selling are more than 20% of value added. The estimates correlate significantly with variables suggested by theory, indicating validity.

We offer a new perspective on the effect of relationship-specific investment on contract complexity, which has broad implications because complex contracts and vertical integration are substitutes. A simple model using transaction cost economics (TCE) predicts that buyer and seller...

Randomized response methods, which were designed to elicit candid answers to sensitive questions, have not succeeded in eliminating reticence in survey responses. We implement a methodology that effectively stands the randomized response technique on its head, using it to identify reticent...

To ascertain the prevalence of soft budgets and to find causes of softness, we surveyed Mongolian enterprises, asking whether state aid was expected when financial difficulties arose. One-quarter of enterprises expected soft-budgets, a large proportion of which have central government ownership....