"This primer contains an extended survey of the current state of the art of constitutional political economy. It summarizes the major research questions, discusses the methods and tools used by scholars working in this field, and presents the results regarding both the effects of constitutional rules as well as their determinants. It also contains an extended outlook sketching possible future issues that deserve to be taken up."
Why is it that some countries become rich while others remain poor? Do markets require regulation to function efficiently? If markets offer an efficient way of exchanging goods, why do individuals even create firms? How are economic transactions organized in the absence of a state that could enforce contracts and guarantee property rights? Institutional economics has allowed social scientists to answer many fundamental questions about the organization and functioning of societies. This introduction to institutional economics is concise, yet easy to understand. It not only caters to students of economics but to anybody interested in this topical research area and its specific subfields. Both formal and informal institutions (such as customs, habits, and traditions) are discussed with respect to their causes and consequences, highlighting the important part they play for economic growth and development.
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Over 10 years ago, Feld and Voigt (2003) introduced the first indicator for objectively meas-uring the actual independence of the judiciary and demonstrated its utility in a large cross-section of countries. The indicator has been widely used, but also criticized. This paper pre-sents more recent data on de jure and de facto judicial independence (JI) and strongly con-firms previous results that de jure JI is not systematically related to economic growth, but de facto JI is highly significantly and robustly correlated with growth. In addition, we show that the effect of de facto JI depends on the institutional environment, but not on a country's initial per capita income.
This paper explores the idea that institutional details matter and that attempts to estimate the economic effects of federalism by employing a simple dummy variable neglect potentially important institutional details. Based on a principal component analysis, seven aspects of both federalism and decentralization are used as variables for explaining differences in (1) fiscal policy, (2) government effectiveness, (3) economic productivity, and (4) happiness. The results show that institutional details do, indeed, matter. Different aspects of federalism impact on the outcome variables to different degrees. This study adds to our knowledge on the transmission mechanisms of federalism and decentralization.
Warum haben weltweit nur einige hundert Millionen Menschen ein sehr hohes Pro-Kopf-Einkommen, während Milliarden unterernährt sind? Warum führt der Import von – andernorts sehr erfolgreichen – Verfassungen häufig nicht zu Wohlstand und Stabilität? Institutionenökonomen beanspruchen, diese Fragen anders und umfassender anzugehen als traditionelle Ökonomen. Die vorliegende Einführung ist nicht nur für Studierende der Wirtschaftswissenschaften geeignet, sondern auch für solche anderer Fächer. Denn auch informelle Institutionen wie Sitten, Gebräuche und Traditionen werden behandelt, weil immer deutlicher wird, dass diese entscheidend für Wachstum und Entwicklung sind. "Dieses gelungene Lehrbuch wird nicht nur Ökonomen wärmstens empfohlen, sondern auch Politologen, Soziologen und Juristen, die nach einem Einstiegswerk in die Neue Institutionenökonomik suchen." Prof. Dr. Chris Mantzavinos, Universität Witten-Herdecke
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Legal philosophers like Montesquieu, Hegel and Tocqueville have argued that lay participation in judicial decision-making would have benefits reaching far beyond the realm of the legal system narrowly understood. From an economic point of view, lay participation in judicial decision-making can be interpreted as a renunciation of an additional division of labor, which is expected to cause foregone benefits in terms of the costs as well as the quality of judicial decision-making. In order to be justified, these foregone benefits need to be overcompensated by other actually realized benefits of at least the same magnitude. This paper discusses pros and cons of lay participation, presents a new database and tests some of the theoretically derived hypotheses empirically. The effects of lay participation on the judicial system, a number of governance variables but also on economic performance indicators are rather modest. A proxy representing historic experiences with any kind of lay participation is the single most robust variable.