By comparing the development of landownership in China and England, this paper explores what were behind their different trajectories. In particular, I examined the delineation of property rights, alienation of land, rent and tax, inheritance and accumulation of land. Feudal England was a...

This paper revisits one of the classic debates on world capitalist development – the ‘transition to capitalism’ debate framed in Robert Brenner’s classic critique of World Systems and Dependency Theory. It was originally presented to the July 2007 conference of the International...

A well-established result in the theoretical literature on labour market flexibility is that the employment should be more volatile in "flexible" labour markets. Over the last 35 years, Italy gives a good example of a transition from an over-regulated labour market into a quite more flexible...

In this paper we examine the importance of institutional arrangements and factors related to the economic structure to explain inflation outcomes in Latin America. We perform a dynamic panel data analysis with an ample set of variables that allowed us to consider the temporal dimension of the...

The recent empirical growth literature has proposed three underlying fundamental determinants of economic growth, namely, physical geography, economic integration, and institutional quality. This paper unpacks the final determinant into both political-economic institutions as well as the...

Prepublication version of ‘When things go wrong: the Political Economy of Market Breakdown’ in Westra; R and Alan Zuege (Eds) (2003) Value and the World Economy Today: Production; Finance and Globalization; pp91-118. London:MacMillan; ISBN: 1 40390 002 7 This paper constructs a theoretical...

We report results from two different settings of a 3-player ultimatum game. Under the monocratic rule, a player is randomly selected to make an offer to two receivers. Under the democratic rule, all three players make a proposal, and one proposal is then extracted. A majority vote is required to...

The paper analyses a new leximetric dataset for India relating to the protection of shareholders of the limited liability corporate sector and examines the impact of the changes in the shareholder protection law on economic development through stock market development. It finds no long-term...

Recent empirical studies concerning the impact of foreign direct investment (FDI) on economic development have all been taking into account FDI as a whole. However, the theoretical literature on the topic argues that more attention should be devoted to distinguishing FDI by type, and suggests...

This work consists of two essays on law and finance in international trade. It addresses the means of raising funds for investment through receivables financing and project finance. The first essay discusses the role of receivables financing and in particular factoring in international trade. It...