Much agreement exists among economic historians that an institutional structure which allows for broad participation in a country's economy is conducive to growth. With respect to England's institutional structure, changes that followed the Glorious Revolution of 1688 are given pride of place in recent literature. This article contributes to this literature by highlighting and explaining regulatory change that removed barriers to entry into the country's most vital industry, textiles, in the years between 1550 and 1640. However, although economic historians have tended to explain England's growth-facilitating institutions as arising abruptly through political revolution that placed constraints on the Crown, this article will elucidate change that was protracted, accretive, peaceful, and came through royal institutions. More specifically, this article argues that restrictive regulations, which were widely supported, were removed because Crown and Council, in consultation with local officials, recognized that enforcement would come at the cost of the greater priority of employment preservation.

Smart contracts have been proposed as a means of revolutionizing transacting between human actors and contributing to blockchain platforms substituting for many current institutions. However, the technical nature of blockchain platforms and smart contracts requires levels of certainty and foresight sufficient for contracts to be complete. We examine the technical and economic characteristics of blockchains and smart contracts to identify sources of uncertainty that may pose challenges to the ability of these technologies to displace existing institutional arrangements, in particular, the courts and other arbitration arrangements. Despite the development of alternative automated blockchain institutions such as the Kleros dispute resolution system, the case for smart contracts and blockchain applications to supplant real-world institutions remains weak. Inherent incompleteness due to limits to information availability, human cognition, and communication means that traditional contract governance institutions will continue to complement blockchain smart contract governance arrangements. The more complex and unique the transaction, the higher the value at risk, the harder to anticipate and precisely specify contingencies and measure and observe outcomes. Furthermore, the longer the time frame between agreement and execution, the less likely it is that smart contracting will be more efficient than traditional contracting.

This paper links banking system development to the colonial and legal history of African countries. Based on a sample of 40 African countries from 2000 to 2018, our empirical findings show a significant dependence of current financial institutions on the inherited legal origin and the colonization type. Findings also reveal that current financial legal institutions are not major determinants of banking system development, and that institutional development and governance quality are more important. A high share of government spending relative to GDP also positively affects banking system development in African countries.

Several existing studies have documented a negative relationship between firm financial constraint and export activities but do not attempt to examine factors that could attenuate this relationship in Africa. In this paper, we examine the effect of financial constraint on exports in Africa and explore how the level of trust in countries where firms are located shapes this relationship. We combine the World Bank Enterprise Surveys with different measures of country-level personal and interpersonal trust computed from the Afrobarometer surveys of 19 African countries. Our results show that financial constraints negatively affect export activities. However, this negative effect is attenuated for firms that are located in trust-intensive societies. These findings are robust to different specifications. Interestingly, we find that small and medium-sized enterprises in Africa are more likely to be affected by financial constraints but also more likely to benefit from a higher level of both personal and interpersonal trust, while for larger firms only interpersonal trust matters.

In this study, we investigate the mediating effect of institutional networking on the relationship between perceived corruption and the growth of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). We also examine the moderating impact of financial slack on the relationship between perceived corruption and institutional networking. We test our moderated mediation model using data from 212 SMEs operating in Ghana. The findings from the study show that perceived corruption is positively related to institutional networking and this relationship is amplified when levels of financial slack are greater. The findings also show that institutional networking positively mediates the relationship between perceived corruption and SME growth. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

Habraken's Structure of the Ordinary (SOTO), Jacobs' view of cities, and Ostrom's Design Principles and Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework focus on essential elements and relationships for the effective governance of the environment. However, they have different perspectives about what is necessary for successful governance. This article compares and contrasts Habraken's, Jacobs', and Ostrom's views and applies them to Common Interest Developments (CIDs). Habraken, Jacobs, and Habraken discuss the importance of public territory. Habraken views public territory as relative: a territory in a built environment can be private relative to a larger, or higher level, territory, and public relative to an included, lower level, territory. Jacobs discusses the importance of connections and accommodating strangers without sacrificing safety. Ostrom views common-pool resources as goods whose use causes less to be available to others. For their part, CIDs represent a particular governance vehicle for defining what is public and private in large residential developments. For both Habraken and Ostrom, the transformation of the physical environment reflects agents' common values constrained by material, technical, cultural, and economic conditions. Rather than one mutual understanding, Jacobs wrote that balancing the commercial and the guardian values is crucial for society's health and survival.

We test the effect of institutional quality on capital structure in the microfinance setting. In doing this, we rely on data from 532 microfinance institutions (MFIs) located in 73 countries dotted across the six microfinance regions in the world. We observe that institutional quality exhibits a robust negative and statistically significant relationship with capital structure in both the short and long run, implying that MFIs in countries with a better institutional environment are less likely to utilize more debt. Our moderation analysis furnishes us with evidence that the presence of women on the board of an MFI significantly moderates the relationship between institutional quality and its capital structure. We show that in the presence of more female representation on the boards of MFIs, the tendency of MFIs using less debt is higher.

Louisiana consistently ranks as one of the most corrupt states in the nation. In fact, the Pelican State is the most corrupt state when looking at the most common indicator of corruption: corruption convictions per 100,000. What is less clear about Louisiana is how the state became corrupt. This paper seeks to provide the missing link. I argue that the high levels of corruption in the state can be explained by its origins in French civil law. This historical influence has perverse and persistent effects on the state, despite occurring over 200 years ago. Through these origins in civil law, corruption in Louisiana impacts its economic institutions. These institutions then lead to a variety of other bad outcomes in the state such as a high dependency on oil and low incomes. This argument implies that resource dependency is bad for development only when institutional quality is low. By linking legal origins to corruption, institutions, and economic outcomes, I seek to offer a clearer explanation for why Louisiana sets itself apart from other states in its politically corrupt environment.

All law is relatively coarse after its initial implementation as the legislature cannot foresee all contingencies that can arise in the actual application of the law. Therefore, decisions need to be made by street-level administrators as novel and particular circumstances arise. Economists have largely ignored the political science literature on street-level bureaucrats, such as policemen, welfare case managers, or regulatory agents. I present a case study in the context of market entry regulation in Germany. Qualitative and quantitative evidence suggests that bureaucratic discretion exists, that is, administrative actions can be found on different ends of a decision space, and that its effects are potentially large. Administrators do not apply legislation in a uniform manner and we observe a systematically different application of rules across subnational jurisdictions.

Most American police departments claim to practice community-oriented policing (COP). The stated goals are to build partnerships between the police and the community, maintain order and quality of life, and solve problems that contribute to crime and fear of crime. However, researchers have noted how most departments attempting to implement COP have fallen short in successfully adopting the recommended reforms. This paper argues that the institutional setting in which American public policing operates leads to this result. By contrast, the institutional features of private security make its operation more conducive to achieving the goals of COP. These institutional differences include whether economic calculation is possible, the domain that is policed, and which rules are enforced.