Ownership and control are rarely synonymous. This paper examines the factors motivating Mexican agrarian communities with forests to participate and invest in timber production activities, an opportunity which has opened in the last twenty years due to changes in Mexican forestry policy. We...

This essay surveys the new institutional economics, a rapidly growing literature combining economics, law, organization theory, political science, sociology, and anthropology to understand social, political, and commercial institutions. This literature tries to explain what institutions are, how...

We examine the effect of relationship-specific investment on contract complexity, which has broad implications because complex contracts and vertical integration have similar causal origins. It is usually assumed that transaction cost economics (TCE) implies that relationship-specific investment...

Impersonal exchange increases trade and specialization opportunities, encouraging economic growth. However it requires the support of sophisticated public institutions. This paper explains how Classical Rome provided such support in the main areas of economic activity by relying on public...

We suggest a unified framework to explain the following stylized pattern in the development of contractual governance and industrial organization. Contractual governance in many emerging economies is characterized by relational contracting. Coincident with relational contracts are large,...

The railways of Russia and the CEE countries - generally much more freight oriented, and much more important to their countries' economies, than those of Western Europe - are in the process of restructuring. In most cases the "vertical separation" reform model is being pursued, and reformers are...

Purpose—Amidst burgeoning attention for global value chains (GVCs) in international business (IB), this paper identifies a clear “missing link” in this literature, and discusses implications for research and corporate social responsibility (CSR) policy-making and...

(Agro)ecosystem services is a "new“ term, which is rapidly and widely used in academic studies, and policies and business practices around the globe. Nevertheless, in many countries around the globe, studies associated with agroecosystem services and their "management“ are at the beginning...

Decentralised finance (DeFi) represents an extremely interesting and continuously growing area of the financial sector. The present paper analyses varied types of digital platforms, expression of different degrees of decentralisation/disintermediation, focusing on capital raising ones since...

The ECSPR covers only financial-return crowdfunding-FRC. Nonetheless, crowdfunding goes beyond monetary incentives: reward-based and donation-based crowdfunding represent the ‘other side of the moon’ in the crowdfunding universe. The Chapter, after describing the main features of...