Paper discusses the factors that contribute to the spread of corruption as well as the implications of corruption for markets and for public sector activities. It is argued that corruption can be contained mainly by a scaling down of the public sector activities that stimulate its growth

A key feature of a legal system is the set of institutions used to aggregate the citizens' preferences over the harshness of punishment, i.e., the legal tradition. While under common law appellate judges' biases offset one another at the cost of volatility of the law, under civil law the...

This paper offers a novel account of the rise of religious freedom. Religious and political power have been bound together since pre-history. As a consequence, there was an absence of religious freedom throughout most of history. Even when religious dissidents were not being persecuted for their...

Turkey, which is a predominantly Muslim country, enacted an education law in 1997 which increased the compulsory secular education from five to eight years. We employ a unique nation-wide survey of adults in 2012 to investigate the impact of education on religiosity, lifestyles and political...

Well-functioning institutions, both formal (i.e. rule of law) and informal (i.e. trust), facilitate economic exchange. To investigate the nature of the relationship between formal and informal institutions, we analyze bilateral trade patterns in a sample of 16 European countries between...

This paper invokes foundational property rights theories to explain the persistence of insecure tenure in Côte d'Ivoire and Ghana. The case studies affirm the theories' core propositions: when relative factor prices change, actors seek more narrowly defined rights to newly valued resources....

The standard economic model of crime emphasizes the individual rationality and agency of criminals. On the other hand, sociological theories typically emphasize the importance of social forces. This essay surveys a recent strand of literature on law enforcement that bridges these two approaches....

Research on corruption has made substantial progress in recent years. Yet, most studies still treat corruption as a homogenous phenomenon. This article argues that private-sector corruption can be distinguished conceptually from public-sector corruption, which has been in the spotlight of...