Published in Accounting, Economics, and Law: A Convivium
This article is a review of Katharina Pistor’s book The Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality. Using modern derivatives markets as a case study, it explores the important contributions – and limits – of Professor Pistor’s story about the role of the law and lawyers as the master coders of capitalism. This exploration reveals th...
Published in Future Business Journal
This paper examines the causal relationship between governance indicators and economic growth in Afghanistan. We use a set of quarterly time series data from 2003Q1 to 2018Q4 to test our hypothesis. Following Toda and Yamamoto’s (J Econom 66(1–2):225–250, 1995. 10.1016/0304-4076(94)01616-8) vector autoregressive model and the modified Wald test, ou...
Published in Review of Law & Economics
The Coase theorem states that where there are externalities and no transaction costs resource allocation is Pareto-optimal and independent of the stakeholders’ legal position. This result has been challenged many times. In the cooperative game approach to resource allocation, the refutation is made by constructing a three-person game which has an e...
Published in Public Choice
Rent-seeking behavior can thrive in democratic and other forms of government where the government is able to hand out exclusive privileges or positions. One of the most famous examples is the venal aristocratic Ancien Régime of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France. This paper presents the Revolution as guided by private interests rather than ...
Published in Economics and Business Review
The German unification in 1990 generated many benefits, but also many disappointments. After the introduction of the monetary union between the GDR and West Germany on 1 July 1990, the East German industry collapsed, and mass unemployment became persistent. Ever since the modalities of the monetary union have been discussed controversially. This pa...
Published in Man and the Economy
The Theory of Share Tenancy by Steven Cheung, first published as a PhD thesis 50 years ago, was an important watershed study on the economics of contracts. It contained the first formal demonstration of the Coase Theorem, linked the concepts of property rights and transaction costs, laid early foundations for the future economics of contracts, and ...
Published in International Review of Economics
Many nudges are designed to make people better off, as judged by themselves. This criterion, meant to ensure that nudges will increase people’s welfare, contains some ambiguity. It is useful to distinguish among three categories of cases: (1) those in which choosers have clear antecedent preferences, and nudges help them to satisfy those preference...
Published in Review of Law & Economics
In this article, we study judicial behavior at the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council (JCPC). British judges in general, and British high court judges in particular, are perceived to be independent and isolated from political pressure and interference. Furthermore, these judges tend to show a particularly high rate of consensus. This has led m...
Published in Man and the Economy
This paper introduces the concept of ‘ritual’ for analysing the interaction between informal and formal institutions, taking land property rights in South China as an empirical case. By ritual, we refer to public actions that involve artefacts and create common knowledge about behavioural patterns in a population. This theoretical notion of ritual ...
Published in Journal of Population Economics
This study is the first to comprehensively examine the effect of state anti-bullying laws (ABLs) on school safety and youth violence. Using existing data from the Youth Risk Behavior Surveys and the Uniform Crime Reports, and newly-collected data on school shootings, we find little evidence that the typical state ABL is effective in improving schoo...
