Working Paper
Local governance quality and law compliance
Using panel data of manufacturing enterprises in Mozambique between 2012 and 2017, we investigate how changes in perceived quality of governance are related to firms’ law compliance. Controlling for firm-level unobserved heterogeneity, we look at...
Working Paper
The legal configuration of hydrocarbon infrastructure
The United States’ greenhouse gas mitigation strategy decentralizes mitigation responsibility to the states and states have primary regulatory jurisdiction over electrical power utilities. Using the biophysical approach, this paper introduces the...
Working Paper
Security of Property Rights for Whom?
Recent research regarding property rights and economic development often treats property rights security in a country as homogeneous, although protecting the private entitlements of some can entail preventing others from claiming and controlling...
Working Paper
Gender, Islam, and law
This paper considers arguments about Islam and women’s welfare, and, at greater length, how legal systems with Islamic elements treat women, with a focus on how women fare in Islamic family courts. Key methodological issues include how to focus on...
Working Paper
Human Rights and the Prevention of Humanitarian Emergencies
This paper defines a role for human rights and human rights workers in the discussion of humanitarian emergencies. The approach is to look at how human rights law, monitoring, and information can be useful in two ways: (1) to warn of an impending...
Working Paper
Local content law and practice
Local content and local participation policy and legislation have come to stay in Ghana’s oil and gas industry. The policy and legislation have been described largely as adequate, promising, and necessary to promote local content and local...
Blog
From the Editor's Desk (June-July 2012)
Tony Addison I started writing this ‘From the Editor’s Desk’ in Accra, to the sound of an African drum band, preparing for a ceremony to mark the...
Working Paper
Financial Sector Development and Growth
This paper documents the financial and institutional developments of China during the past two decades, when China was successfully transformed from a rigid central-planning economy to a dynamic market economy following its unique path. We...
Working Paper
State Recognition of the Right to Food at the National Level
This paper considers to what extent the human right to food has been recognized by countries in the world, by analysing international obligations and constitutional provisions, bearing in mind that the right to food may be either explicitly or...
Working Paper
The Rule of Law, Legal Traditions, and Economic Growth in East Asia
This paper examines the literature on the rule of law and economic development, and in particular the influential argument by La Porta et al., on the superiority of the Anglo-American common law system in fostering financial development. In this...
Book
Linking the Formal and Informal Economy
PAPERBACK: The concepts of formal and informal remain central to the theory and practice of development more than half a century after they were introduced into the debate. They help structure the way that statistical services collect data on the...
Working Paper
Legal opacity, narcotics laws, and drug seizures
We show that legal opacity is a strong factor in drug trafficking. We develop a new framework that illustrates how legal opacity influences countries’ seizure rates. Legal opacity reduces the detection of illicit flows and increases their volumes...
Working Paper
Law enforcement and illegal markets
I describe how monitoring and harsher law enforcement reduce the expected economic benefits of crime. I investigate the effect of shifts in legal authorities’ surveillance by focusing on junkyards, firms often associated with illegal markets and auto...
Working Paper
The legal basis for affirmative action in India
The affirmative action policy in India came into practice because of the generations of struggle undergone by the untouchable castes and other backward classes, who were historically excluded from education and administration. As society changed, it...