This paper introduces the V-form organisation, a new form of firm organisation where vertical integration is outsourced to a decentralized distributed ledger (a blockchain). V-form organisations rely on the coordination of a (trusted) third party. It looks specifically at two instances of V-form...

What are the long-run economic and policy consequences of wide-spread blockchain technology adoption? We examine the structural economic effects of this institutional innovation as disintermediation in markets, dehierarchicalisation of organisations, and growing private provision of economic...

What are the long-run economic and policy consequences of wide-spread blockchain technology adoption? We examine the structural economic effects of this institutional innovation as disintermediation in markets, dehierarchicalisation of organisations, and growing private provision of economic...

We extend the Institutional Possibility Frontier (IPF) — a theoretical framework depicting the institutional trade-offs between the dual costs of dictatorship and disorder (Djankov et al. 2003) — by incorporating the notion of subjective costs. The costs of institutional choice are not...

Blockchains are the distributed, decentralised ledger technology underlying Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. We apply Oliver Williamson's transactions cost analysis to the blockchain consensus mechanism. Blockchains reduce the costs of opportunism but are not “trustless”. We show that...

This paper argues that populism in the era of Donald Trump and Brexit is a reaction to high transaction costs between citizens and the political class. In the Westminster system, voters delegate large amounts of decision-making power to elected representatives, who in turn delegate much of their...

The problem of regulatory accumulation has increasingly been recognized as a policy problem in its own right. Governments have then devised and implemented regulatory reform policies that directly seek to ameliorate the burdens of regulatory accumulation (e.g. red tape reduction targets). In...

In this paper we outline the economics of healthcare as a problem of coordinating data and examine how blockchain technology might be applied as new economic infrastructure to govern those data rights. We argue that blockchain as a technology of trust pushes the economic organisation of...

Knowledge about property rights is a commons that facilitates market exchange and economic coordination. The governance of that shared knowledge resource—the various formal and informal rules that maintain ledgers of property rights—ranges from community norms to formal state registries. In...

Since the mid-twentieth century, development economists have identified barriers to economic growth including financing a savings-investment gap, planning investments, and institutional change. Efforts to overcome these development barriers range from centralised planned intervention to...