This paper analysis the global distribution of art collections and collectors´ biases with respect to the origin of artworks. Employing a unique dataset we find that the greatest number of private art collections are located in Europe, North America and Asia. There are relatively few...

The economics of crime and punishment postulates that higher punishment leads to lower crime levels, or less severe crime. It is however hard to get empirical support for this rather intuitive relationship. This paper offers a model that can contribute to explain why this is the case. We show...

An increasing share of world FDI is carried out by multinationals from developing countries. These investors may have objectives and constraints that di¤er from their developed country counterparts. In this paper we focus on differences in attitudes to corruption, and how these may shape the...

Financially constrained borrowers have the incentive to influence the appraisal process in order to increase borrowing or reduce the interest rate. We document that the average valuation bias for residential refinance transactions is above 5%. The bias is larger for highly leveraged...

The Spanish business code allowed firms great flexibility in their organizational form in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Until 1920, firms had the same basic choices as in France and some other European countries, namely, the corporation, the ordinary partnership, or the...

The relationship between law and economic development remains enigmatic. Broadly speaking, there is no doubt that legal mechanisms for social control (or ‘institutions’, to use North's words) play a major role. Nevertheless, the impact of legal organization on economic development has not...

This essay asks whether business firms should be treated as moral or legal persons, capable of bearing rights and duties as distinct entities. Building on earlier work describing firms as relational contracts in performance [Adelstein, 2010], it considers the nature of legal and moral...

The author analyzes the different forms of relationships between businesses and bodies of state power in Russia: private and public partnership, the delegation of public powers and property, self-regulation, the transfer of government authority to the private organizations, self-regulation, and...

This paper studies the influence of bank competition on the real effect of 36 systemic banking crises in 30 countries over the 1980–2000 period and how this influence varies across countries depending on bank regulation and institutions. We find that bank market power is not on average useful...

Legal bar closing times in England and Wales have historically been early and uniform. Recent legislation liberalised closing times with the object of reducing social problems thought associated with drinking to “beat the clock.” Indeed, using both difference in difference and synthetic...