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Contents -- Introduction -- 1. Moral Issues in Risk Acceptability -- 2. The Emergence of a New Subdiscipline -- 3. Perception of Risk -- 4. Choice and Risk -- 5. Natural Risks -- 6. Credibility -- 7. Risk-Seeking and Safety First -- 8. Institutional Constraints -- 9. Risks Encoded -- Bibliography -- Acknowledgments

Zusammenfassung
Die Theorie der Ordnungspolitik wird von vielen für einen überholten deutschen Ansatz gehalten. In dieser Arbeit wird gezeigt, dass das völlig unzutreffend ist und dass besonders kreative und wichtige Entwicklungen in der angelsächsischen Welt wie Public Choice, Institutional Economics und Law und Economics im Grunde diesem Gebiet zuzurechnen sind. Außerdem wird nachgewiesen, dass verschiedene Fehlentwicklungen in der gegenwärtigen Kapitalmarkt- und Überschuldungskrise auf die Vernachlässigung des ordnungspolitischen Ansatzes zurückzuführen sind.

Focuses on rational choice institutionalism, principal-agent framework, credible commitments, political uncertainty, institutional design, reasons for delegating to independent regulatory agencies (IRAs) in Western Europe, Europeanization of Italian and French IRAs, and impact on regulatory and policy processes; 1980s-1990s; 4 articles.

In this paper, we develop and explore the implications of an economic model that links the incidence of terrorism in a country to the economic circumstances facing that country. We briefly sketch out a theory, in the spirit of Tornell (1998), that describes terrorist activities as being initiated by groups that are unhappy with the current economic status quo, yet unable to bring about drastic political and institutional changes that can improve their situation. Such groups with limited access to opportunity may find it rational to engage in terrorist activities. The result is then a pattern of reduced economic activity and increased terrorism. In contrast, an alternative environment can emerge where access to economic resources is more abundant and terrorism is reduced. Our empirical results are consistent with the theory. We find that for democratic, high income countries, economic contractions (i.e. recessions) can provide the spark for increased probabilities of terrorist activities.

We develop a model of cross-border acquisitions in which the foreign acquirer's ownership choice reflects a trade-off between easing the target's credit constraints and the costs of operating in an environment with weak institutions. Data on domestic and foreign acquisitions in emerging markets over the period 1990-2007 support the model predictions. The share of full foreign acquisitions is higher in sectors more reliant on external finance, in countries with lower financial development, and in countries with higher institutional quality. Sectoral external finance dependence accentuates the effect of country-level financial development and institutional quality. By contrast, the level of foreign ownership in partial acquisitions is insensitive to institutional factors and depends weakly on financial factors.

This paper integrates transaction cost economics with the resource-based view of the firm and new institutional economics to examine how firms' capabilities and institutional environments influence governance decisions. We demonstrate that the impact of firm capabilities on governance choice varies with the level of transaction costs, which is itself a function of the institutional environment. Based on panel data for 240 investor-owned utility companies in 1990–2007, we find that firms with strong institutional safeguards, prior contracting experience, and inferior firm production capabilities will buy more electricity, and make less, to meet increases in demand. We also find that institutional safeguards substitute for prior contracting experience and increase the influence of production capabilities on governance decisions. These findings suggest that firm heterogeneity is a significant factor in governance decisions and that firms' capabilities and institutional environments merit additional consideration in the study of firm governance.

The paper compares decision-making on the centralisation of public goods provision in the presence of regional externalities under representative and direct democratic institutions. A model with two regions, two public goods and regional spillovers is developed in which uncertainty over the true preferences of candidates makes strategic delegation impossible. Instead, it is shown that the existence of rent extraction by delegates alone suffices to make cooperative centralisation more likely through representative democracy. In the noncooperative case, the more extensive possibilities for institutional design under representative democracy increase the likelihood of centralisation. Direct democracy may thus be interpreted as a federalism-preserving institution.

Concurrent taxation is a feature of many federal systems. As a consequence of this fact, the tax policy of one level of government affects the tax base of the other. This paper carries out a theoretical analysis of the interdependent tax-setting decisions of federal and regional governments, paying special attention to institutional features that characterise the U.S. federal system in practice and that formally link the taxes employed at various levels of government (i.e.: tax deductibility). The developed hypotheses are tested with data corresponding to the U.S. personal income taxes for the last decade. We find that when the federal government increases taxes, there is a significant positive response of regional taxes.

Background. Institutions are hard to define and hard to study. Long prominent in political science have been two theories: Rational Choice Institutionalism (RCI) and Historical Institutionalism (HI). Arising from the life sciences is now a third: Evolutionary Institutionalism (EI). Comparative strengths and weaknesses of these three theories warrant review, and the value-to-be-added by expanding the third beyond Darwinian evolutionary theory deserves consideration.Question.Should evolutionary institutionalism expand to accommodate new understanding in ecology, such as might apply to the emergence of stability, and in genetics, such as might apply to political behavior?Methods.Core arguments are reviewed for each theory with more detailed exposition of the third, EI. Particular attention is paid to EI's gene-institution analogy; to variation, selection, and retention of institutional traits; to endogeneity and exogeneity; to agency and structure; and to ecosystem effects, institutional stability, and empirical limitations in behavioral genetics.Findings.RCI, HI, and EI are distinct but complementary.Conclusions. Institutional change, while amenable to rational-choice analysis and, retrospectively, to critical-juncture and path-dependency analysis, is also, and importantly, ecological. Stability, like change, is an emergent property of institutions, which tend to stabilize after change in a manner analogous to allopatric speciation. EI is more than metaphorically biological in that institutional behaviors are driven by human behaviors whose evolution long preceded the appearance of institutions themselves.

Over the course of the twentieth century curriculum differentiation became a mainstay in education, particularly in secondary schools. Much has been written on how this is a purposeful selection process often tied to larger social and political status and relationships. Moreover, knowledge is largely deemed appropriate based upon whose knowledge it is and for what student it is appropriate. Also, within the past two decades, there has been an increase in neoliberal school choice policies and neoconservative standardization policies in public education largely in the form of charter schools and high-stakes testing. These market policies aim to increase innovation and academic achievement via increased competition among schools and students. Nevertheless, many scholars argue that these policies only serve to exacerbate educational inequality. Standardization policies also claim to increase educational equality by holding all students to the same standards, though they have been critiqued for their potential biases against disadvantaged population, their one-dimensional measure of success, and their effect of narrowing the curricula to testing skills only. These two themes in educational research and reform raise questions concerning how curricula content is affected by choice and accountability policies. As a result, this study finds that overall, even among different institutional options within Chicago's school choice policy, low-performing, low-status schools are increasingly similar in stated course plans which emphasize test preparation and skills specifically for standardized tests, particularly in the test taking year. Also, schools that have the highest achievement scores, ironically, also have the most authority to deviate from a test preparation focused curricula with the ability to focus on developing abstract skills in students, such as critical thinking and cultural awareness.

This paper presents a model allowing to analyze voting, welfare institutions and economic performance. We consider a political economy framework with three classes of agents: entrepreneurs, employed workers and unemployed workers. Agents vote on alternative institutional options: the degree of labour market flexibility and the intensity of redistribution. We show that the welfare state configuration depends on the nature of the political system ? majoritarian, coalition, two-party. Because internationalization reduces the possibility for national government to effectively tax profits, the existing political coalition is fragilized by the process of globalization. The model generates results concerning the macroeconomic equilibrium employment level. Hence we can assess the effects of internationalization on macroeconomic performance. The impact of internalization depends on the nature of the political system (majoritarian versus coalition government) and on the institutional configuration (positive flexibility versus positive redistribution).

A theory of group solidarity / by Michael Hechter -- Determinants of group cohesion in contemporary Japan / by Mary C. Brinton -- Normative and rational explanations of a classic case / by Debra Friedman -- A French political regionalism, 1849-1978 / by William Brustein -- Karl Polanyi's social theory / by Michael Hechter -- A theory of institutional change and the economic history of the Western world / by Douglass C. North -- The predatory theory of rule / by Margaret Levi -- Why workers strike / by Debra Friedman

This paper presents a positive model which shows that institutional setups on capital and labor markets might be intertwined by politicoeconomic forces. Two politicoeconomic equilibria arise from our model, one with little protection of insiders on capital and labor markets, and another one with an institutional bias toward favoring insiders on both markets. Coherent and relatively homogeneous societies, where binding commitments enjoy greater feasability, are more likely to be found in the latter, corporatist equilibrium, whereas fragmented, heterogeneous Anglo-Saxon societies fit better into the former category. These predictions of the model receive considerable support in our cross-country empirical analysis, thus being potentially important for the current debates concerning the reforms of labor markets and of corporate governance systems.