Contract enforcement is acknowledged as a major issue in Law and in Economics. Contrasting substitution and complementary perspectives with respect to the role of private versus public enforcement institutions, this article analyses how contract law can support private institutions, and enhance...

Our chapter is organized as follows. Section I comes back to the characteristics of the water sector. It describes some key features that may explain the slow pace of reform and that may also help better understanding characteristics and limits of that process. Then, a historical and global...

This paper focuses on forms that involve multiple partners pooling some strategic decision rights and even some property rights while keeping distinct ownership over key assets, so that they require specific governance to monitor and discipline their interactions. I identify these arrangements...

Douglass North, along with Ronald Coase and Oliver Williamson, transformed the early intuitions of new institutional economics into powerful conceptual and analytical tools that spawned a robust base of empirical research. NIE arose in response to questions not well explained by standard...

[eng] A new approach to the agro-food sector: the new institutional economics - The agro-food sector represents an exceptional domain of analysis for the two major branches of the research program in New Institutional Economics, i.e.: the microanalytics, focusing on the study of «governance...

[eng] There is a vast literature in transaction cost economics on the choice made by firms to integrate or not. To our knowledge, there have been no previous tests for understanding decisions made by governments to provide a service or to outsource. Our paper presents such a test, using a data...