We characterize the comparative efficiency of industry self-regulation as means of social control of torts. Unlike liability, which is imposed by courts ex post, industry self-regulation, much like government regulation, acts before the harm is done. As compared to government regulators,...

Organized legal professions often play a central role in successful institutional development. The paper’s model examines how legal professions affect institutional reform. Professional review of reform proposals solves a politician’s informational problem in a way that makes democracy,...

We contribute to the scant empirical literature on court activity by examining how judicial staffing and caseload influence court output in Slovenia, a post-socialist EU member state struggling with implementing an effective judicial system. Unlike the majority of the existing literature, we...

While the tradeoff between market failure and government failure has been explored both theoretically and in practical policy design, the question of whether this trade-off appears in the calculus of citizens’ demands for government regulation remains underexplored. We first clarify the...

We study the desirability of interventionist harmonization of legal standards across multiple, mutually interdependent jurisdictions which strive to adapt law to their local conditions as well as to synchronize it with other jurisdictions. In a setting where jurisdictions are privately informed...

Social interaction among individuals with a preference for conformity gives rise to coordination externalities which are not internalized in a non-cooperative setting. Mandating behavioral conformity, by centrally imposing a common, group-wide action, internalizes these coordination...

We contribute to the scant empirical literature on the functioning of courts in the post-socialist world by analyzing civil case disposition in Slovenia. We first characterize basic empirical patterns in modes of civil case disposition in Slovenian local courts. We then examine court-level...

Since giving to religious organizations constitutes a substantial portion of total charitable giving, an understanding of the determinants of religious giving is a vital policy concern. Drawing on a novel congregation-level panel dataset, we examine whether religious giving is driven by...

Most modernization or development theories that incorporate law emphasize a growth in the scope of individual choice as law becomes impartial, relevant to all. An early expression of this conceptualization was Henry Maine's (1822-1888) celebrated dictum that progressive societies move from...