Are people more likely to infringe on a legal obligation if they perceive it as unfair? This question is especially relevant in situations with low potential punishment for disobeying an obligation, i.e., with expressive law. To explore this issue, we present experimental evidence on how...

This paper analyzes trial by poison ingestion, or “sassywood,” as an institution of criminal justice in contemporary Liberia. We argue that effective criminal justice institutions must satisfy three conditions: they must be accessible to citizens, incentivize judicial administrators to...

What explains cross-country differences in the quality of institutions, such as judicial independence and government regulations of economic life, and in desirable social and economic outcomes, such as a low degree of corruption and high degree of rule of law? In some of the most widely cited...

Property rights institutions significantly hinder firm productivity but not contracting institutions in China. Weakening property rights institutions by a standard deviation lowers firm productivity by 34.4% of its corresponding standard deviation. Small firms find weak property rights...

Specifying system transformations of the standard-legal base of market institu-tions is a purpose of the article, in it in the sphere of attitudes to the work and the employment in the Republic of Belarus, in individual stages of the transformation of the economics of the country after 1991,...

According to recent act of trainer/instructor profession deregulation in Poland, no courses or exams are required to become a trainer or sport instructor. After changes, any common person is allowed to practice sports coaching. The aim of the research was to become familiar with the parents...

This paper documents and studies the gender gap in performance among associate lawyers in the United States. Unlike other high-skilled professions, the legal profession measures and rewards productivity with objective methods that are widely used and comparable across firms: the number of hours...

We find an economic rationale for the common sense answer to the question in our title — courts should not always enforce what the contracting parties write. We describe and analyze a contractual environment that allows a role for an active court. An active court can improve on the outcome...

We describe and analyze a contractual environment that allows a role for an active court. The model we analyze is the same as in Anderlini, Felli, and Postlewaite (2006). An active court can improve on the outcome that the parties would achieve without it. The institutional role of the court is...