The archetype of the New Deal agency, exercising neutral, technocratic expertise, is no longer tenable. As Richard Stewart (1975) noted thirty-five years ago, administrative law “is undergoing a fundamental transformation.” Following Stewart, the modern explanation in legal scholarship of...

Previous studies have argued that democracy diminishes the extent to which contests over political leadership depress economic growth, by reducing the violence and uncertainty attendant on such contests. We reconsider the theoretical basis for this claim, highlighting the separate roles of...

Why do developing countries fail to adopt the institutions and policies that promote development? Our answer is the violence trap. Key political reforms — opening access and reducing rents — are typically feasible only when the domestic economy reaches a given level of complexity (for...

Most students of constitutions focus on normative questions or study the effects of particular constitutional provisions. This paper falls into a third and much smaller tradition that attempts to study what makes some constitutions more likely to survive. This paper develops a theory of...

All federal systems face the two fundamental dilemmas of federalism: too strong a center risks overawing the subnational units; and too weak a center risks free-riding that makes the system fall apart. Resolving the two dilemmas is problematic because mitigating one dilemma exacerbates the...

Aligning the interests of local governments with market development is an important issue for developing and transition economies. Using a panel data set from China, we investigate the relationship between provincial government's fiscal incentives and provincial market development. We report...

In 1994 China began a profound reform of its state-owned enterprises. We first describe and characterize this progress in two areas: privatization of small state-owned enterprises at the county level and mass layoffs of excess state workers at the city level. Local governments have initiated...

In this paper I discuss Deirdre McCloskey's argument that “ideas, not capital or institutions,” were the cause of the “great enrichment,” the spectacular growth of the world economy since 1800. I disagree that the ideas of liberty and equality alone caused the great enrichment but agree...

The upper-income, advanced industrial countries of the world today all have market economies with open competition, competitive multi-party democratic political systems, and a secure government monopoly over violence. Such open access orders, however, are not the only norm and equilibrium type...