"We are concerned here with the creation of non-market institutions for reducing the cost of risk in poor agrarian societies that operate at low levels of technology without the benefits of insurance, credit and other intertemporal markets. 1 Institutions, the formal and informal rules that...

"One of the missing links in common property research has been the interaction between common property resource users and the market. The present research fills that gap with a study of Mexico's agrarian communities which coordinate timber production within their commonly-owned forest land. The...

The past few decades have been characterized by a growing body of profit-seeking public service areas with the understanding that profit-seeking organizations will deliver public services more efficiently than government can. These sectors include, but are not limited to, health care,...

What can we learn about applied price theory from the Bourgeois Era? In this paper, we contend there are three important lessons that can be extracted from McCloskey's work on the Great Enrichment. First, transaction costs are not constraints, but objects of choice. Second, property rights are...

In contemporary economic literature, we can find plenty of theoretical and empirical approaches which seek to highlight the most appropriate factorial variables that are associated with the institutional quality of the business environment. This study presents, in a summarised version, the...

This paper presents a multi-stakeholder approach for developing an appropriate privacy regulation in the age of big data. We develop our argument in five steps, starting (1) with a review of the current academic debate on privacy regulation. We analyze a dysfunctional mutual excludability...

For quite a long time, network industries used to be regarded as (natural) monopolies. This was due to these industries having some special characteristics. Network externalities and economies of scale in particular justified the (natural) monopoly thesis. Recently, however, a trend towards...

Transaction costs, one often hears, are the economic equivalent of friction in physical systems. Like physicists, economists can sometimes neglect friction in formulating theories; but like engineers, they can never neglect friction in studying how the system actually does let alone should work....

This paper presents an integrated overview of the literature linking institutions, financial development and economic growth. From the large body of research on institutional development, the paper first selects those contributions that make it possible to study the role of institutional...