Efficient legal rules are central to efficient resource allocation in a market economy. But the question whether the common law actually converges to efficiency in commercial areas has remained empirically untested. We create a data set of 461 state court appellate decisions involving the...

We investigate the determinants of regional development using a newly constructed database of 1569 sub-national regions from 110 countries covering 74 percent of the world?s surface and 96 percent of its GDP. We combine the cross-regional analysis of geographic, institutional, cultural, and...

Intro -- Contents -- Preface -- Introduction -- Political Control of Economic Activity -- Paths to Efficient Ownership -- The Russian Privatization Program -- Results of Russian rivatization -- From Privatization to Restructuring -- Conclusion -- Index.

We present a model of succession in a firm owned and managed by its founder. The founder decides between hiring a professional manager or leaving management to his heir, as well as on how much, if any, of the shares to float on the stock exchange. We assume that a professional is a better...