Although today's richest countries tend to have long histories of secure private property rights, legal-titling projects do little to improve the economic and political well-being of those in the developing world. This book employs a historical narrative based on secondary literature, fieldwork...

Individualistic cultures are associated with economic growth and development. Do they also improve governance of the commons? According to the property rights literature, conservation is more likely when the institutions of property arise from a spontaneous process in response to local problems....

The libertarian case for legal titling is that formalization of the economic (de facto) rights of those who own land and buildings improves prospects for capitalism and, ultimately, development. Although all rich countries have private property rights, we argue that the success of legal titling...

Permission-less (or public) block-chain networks are a new form of decentralized private governance in the digital sphere. Though legal scholars recognize the significance of law in the use of block-chain, existing research using legal and institutional perspectives leaves block-chain governance...

Permissionless blockchains have been described as a novel institutional building block for voluntary economic exchange, with unique protocol features such as automated contract execution, high levels of network and process transparency, and uniquely distributed governance. We argue that...

The structure and operation of blockchains are dynamic, which means that mechanisms must exist for implementing changes. The New Institutional Economics (NIE), with its emphasis on how rules govern the performance of any complex organization or network, provides an especially useful framework to...

This paper critically examines the shortcomings of post-conflict reconstruction efforts in Afghanistan from 2001 to 2021, arguing that an overemphasis on measurable results and causal inference led to overly narrow, community-driven development interventions that failed to appreciate the complex...