Adaptable property-rights institutions, we argue, foster economic development. The British example illustrates this point. Around 1700, Parliament established a forum where rights to land and resources could be reorganized. This venue enabled landholders and communities to take advantage of...

Between 1660 and 1830, Parliament passed thousands of acts restructuring rights to real and equitable estates. These estate acts enabled individuals and families to sell, mortgage, lease, exchange, and improve land previously bound by inheritance rules and other legal legacies. The loosening of...

We present a two-country version of Hansen and Prescott's two-sector long-run growth model, introducing war by letting the countries take land from each other, at the cost of destroying capital and killing people. Because land is an input only in the Malthus sector the transition to a Solow...

This paper uses evidence from German-speaking central Europe to address open questions about the Consumer and Industrious Revolutions. Did they happen outside the early-developing, North Atlantic economies? Were they shaped by the “social capital” of traditional institutions? How were they...

The Mesta was the association of the migratory shepherds of Castile, controlling fine wool production between the thirteenth and the nineteenth centuries. Its royally granted privileges have often been blamed for the stagnant Spanish agricultural productivity during the Early Modern period. I...

This paper studies the causes and consequences of political centralization and fragmentation in China and Europe. We argue that the severe and unidirectional threat of external invasion fostered political centralization in China while Europe faced a wider variety of smaller external threats and...

Russian Abstract: Предлагаемая статья посвящена малоизученной в научной литературе проблеме ликвидации институциональных дефицитов в нормативно-правовом обеспечении...

During the 1840s, twelve American states adopted new constitutions. Eleven of the twelve states adopted new procedures for issuing government debt and for chartering corporations through general incorporation acts. These institutional innovations were American inventions, and today hard budget...

The basis of the economic implications in the Sacred Tradition of the Ortodox Church consist in the socio-economic realities that confronted the Church from the very beginning, besides the endeavours made by the Holy Fathers to give responses, both subjective (through written works, rules, etc.)...

Based on the perspective of central-territory resource allocation, this paper will investigate the influence of the strength of local cultural power on the preference of central-territory resource allocation and the degree of responsiveness to the central government under the shift of identity...