A long tradition in economics explores the association between the quality of formal institutions and economic performance. The literature on the relationship between such institutions and happiness is, however, rather limited, and inconclusive. In this paper, we revisit the findings from recent...

This paper incorporates interdisciplinary New Institutional Economics and suggests a holistic framework for assessing the forms and efficiency of environmental management in agriculture. First, it defines environmental management as a specific system of social order regulating behaviour and...

Intrinsically trustworthy agents never cheat. A society's willingness to trust and the quality of its institutions have their origins in the intrinsic trustworthiness of its citizens. Trustworthiness is the basis for maximizing output in economic exchange and in explaining differences in...

In this paper we incorporate the interdisciplinary New Institutional and Transaction Costs Economics (combining Economics, Organization, Law, Sociology, Behavioral and Political Sciences), and suggest a framework for analyzing the mechanisms of governance of sustainable development. The...

The effects of ISO 9000 diffusion on trade and FDI have gone understudied. We employ panel data reported by OECD nations over the 1995-2002 period to estimate the impact of ISO adoptions on country-pair economic relations. We find ISO diffusion to have no effect in developed nations, but to...

Using banking sector and stock market development indicators, we explore the importance of a wide range of institutional quality variables as sources of financial development. The empirical results based on the dynamic panel system GMM estimations demonstrate that a high-quality institutional...

Regulation is a way of intervention of the public sector, which uses its legitimate and coercive power to establish restrictions to agent’s activities who participate in the market and guarantee the efficient allocation of goods and services and social welfare. In Colombia, as an interesting...

We show that the character and the morality of citizens are important ingredients of economic growth because they go hand in hand with the great institutions of private property, democ-racy, and free markets. Our approach enables us to establish this result by reference to the structure and...

The theoretical model delves into the relationship between labor market institutions and unemployment by proving two propositions: (1) allowing informal activity bolsters job creation, and (2) if the institutional environment is initially, sufficiently, weak, then mitigating it will lower...

We revisit Greif's (1993) analysis of trade between the 11th-century Maghribi traders and present two different models which bring into play, in an essential way, historical features of the Maghribi's organization which had no role in Greif's own analysis. Our reformulation of the Maghribi's...