A theory of property needs to give an account of the whole lifecycle of a property right: How it is initiated, transferred, and terminated. Economics has focused on the transfers in the market and almost completely neglected the question of initiation and termination of property in normal...

Double-entry bookkeeping (DEB) implicitly uses a specific mathematical construction, the group of differences using pairs of unsigned numbers ('T-accounts'). That construction was only formulated abstractly in mathematics in the nineteenth century, even though DEB had been used in the business...

Throughout human affairs there are two dual logics. Albert Hirschman investigated the two logics as the parallel-oriented logic of exit and the series-oriented logic of commitment, loyalty, and voice. Economics focuses almost exclusively on the logic of exit and questions of institutional design...

A decade has passed since the privatization debates concerning Russia and the other transition economies. This note reviews literature on two issues: the overall institutional change strategy, and the alternatives to and arguments against voucher privatization. The alternative is a strategy of...

Many development strategies assume (or desperately hope) that a country already has the capacity to plan and implement institutional reform or that such institutional reform can be pushed through with the external pressures of aid and conditionalities. In a decentralized reform strategy,...

Liberal thought (in the sense of classical liberalism) is based on the juxtaposition of consent to coercion. Autocracy and slavery were seen as based on coercion whereas today's political democracy and economic 'employment system' are based on consent to voluntary contracts. This paper retrieves...

Purpose In addition to increased regulation and platform co-operatives, this paper proposes a third option to address the problem posed by the labor-based platform (LBP) companies and companies' treatment of de facto employees as “independent contractors,” thus avoiding the usual employee...