Should Immigrants Culturally Assimilate or Preserve Their Own Culture? Individual Beliefs and the Longevity of National Identity

We develop and empirically test a theory concerning individual beliefs about whether immigrants should culturally assimilate into the host society or preserve their own cultural norms. We argue that when national identity is a source of intrinsic utility, the longevity of national identity influences a national identity’s perceived resilience to an ostensible immigrant threat and, thus, affects individuals’ beliefs about the need for immigrants’ cultural assimilation. Empirical evidence based on data from countries of wider Europe supports our theory. An expert survey-based measure of the longevity of national identity, first, exhibits a robustly negative effect on the strength of individual preferences in favor of immigrants’ cultural assimilation and, second, is an important contextual moderating variable that shapes the effect of individual-level characteristics on their beliefs. Thus, individual beliefs about the necessity of immigrants’ cultural assimilation versus accommodation of cultural diversity reflect a historically-rooted sense of national identity

Courts in a Transition Economy: Case Disposition and the Quantity-Quality Tradeoff in Bulgaria

The lack of effective judiciary in post-socialist countries has been a pervasive concern and successful judicial reform an elusive goal. Yet to date, little empirical research exists on the functioning of courts in the post-socialist world. We draw on a new court-level panel dataset from Bulgaria to study the determinants of court case disposition and to evaluate whether judicial decision-making is subject to a quantity-quality tradeoff. Addressing endogeneity concerns, we find that case disposition in Bulgarian courts is largely driven by demand for court services. The number of serving judges, a key court resource, matters to a limited extent only in a subsample of courts, a result suggesting that judges adjust their productivity based on the number of judges serving at a court. We do not find evidence implying that increasing court productivity would decrease adjudicatory quality. We discuss the policy implications of our findings

The Duration of Judicial Deliberation: Evidence from Belgium

We utilize case-level data from a large Belgian court to study a policy-relevant but thus far empirically unexplored aspect of judicial behavior: the time that a judge takes to deliberate on a case before rendering a verdict. Exploiting the de facto random administrative assignment of filed cases among the serving judges and using survival analysis methods, we find that the duration of judicial deliberation varies not only with measures of case complexity, but also with judge and disputing party characteristics. We further find evidence consistent with the hypothesis that longer judicial deliberation improves the quality of judicial decisions

Interjurisdictional Linkages and the Scope for Interventionist Legal Harmonization

We study the desirability of interventionist harmonization of legal standards across multiple, mutually interdependent jurisdictions which strive to adapt law to their local conditions as well as to synchronize it with other jurisdictions. In a setting where jurisdictions are privately informed about their local conditions, we contrast the regime of decentralized standard-setting with two means of interventionist harmonization: through centralization and through allocation of lawmaking authority to a particular jurisdiction. Our analysis illuminates the importance of patterns of interjurisdictional linkages in delineating the scope for, and the appropriate means of, interventionist harmonization. We find that greater jurisdictional interdependence - the hallmark of globalization - per se does not justify interventionist harmonization unless increased interdependence results in notable asymmetries in the pattern of jurisdictional interdependence. We also show that, in the presence of cross-jurisdictional externalities, harmonization is, contrary to conventional predictions, not desirable when local preferences are homogeneous across jurisdictions

A Structural Topic Model of the Features and the Cultural Origins of the Baconian Program

We use machine-learning methods to study the features and origins of the Baconian program, a cultural and methodological paradigm viewed as providing the intellectual roots for modern economic growth. After building a machine-readable corpus of Bacon's works, we estimate a structural topic model, a state-of-the-art technique for analysis of text corpora. The estimates uncover the dominant themes in Bacon’s opus, clearly identifying two central to the Baconian program: the emphasis on probing for facts and the epistemology of deriving lessons from those facts. Examining the connectedness of the themes, clear evidence links Bacon’s epistemology to his jurisprudence. The emphasis on seeking facts is linked to Bacon’s epistemology but is less connected with other themes, and therefore much more sui generis with Bacon. The utilitarian promise of science, embraced by Bacon’s followers, is not emphasized by Bacon. Finally, we demonstrate how Bacon’s use of the different themes varies with the intended audience and his chosen medium

Essays in Comparative Institutional Economics

This dissertation examines how decentralized institutional structures and organizational forms evolve and affect economic development under different politico-economic and legal arrangements. Organized legal professions are typically viewed by economists as rent-seeking interest groups - even though they have been central in institutional development in countries with the highest quality institutions. Chapter 1 develops a model that identifies the link between the role of organized legal professions and the quality of reform. Delaying institutional reform through deliberation, the profession's participation discounts the expected benefit from welfare-inferior reform proposal for rent-seeking interest groups. Professional review serves as a screening mechanism ameliorating the self-interested government's adverse selection problem. The model's predictions cast new light on the Glorious and the French revolutions, post-communist transition, why and when civil law and common law systems differ, and why post-independence institutions are of higher quality in settler than in extractive colonies. Although common, self-regulation as an alternative to direct government regulation has been little investigated. Chapter 2 uses a framework inspired by property rights theory to address the allocation of regulatory authority. In a model of a regulatory process with bargaining, the authority to amend the enabling legislation can be either consolidated within the government, or extended to the producers in a self-regulatory regime. The chapter delineates the welfare implications of regulatory regime choice, and indicates whether the government's incentives to delegate or centralize regulatory authority lead to efficient institutional design. The model identifies those features of legal traditions that help to explain variation in regulatory arrangements across countries, illuminates the contrast in regulatory practice between the progressive era and the associational regime of the New Deal, and characterizes the mechanisms of intervention used in fascist economies. Chapter 3 discusses the channels through which civil society is expected to affect economic development. Utilizing the formal analysis laid out in Chapter 1, the chapter provides an introductory examination of the rationale for civil society aid and concludes with a conjectural interpretation of the determinants of the aid's effectiveness to bring about successful institutional change in post-communist countries

Essays on the Historical and Current Institutional Development of South East and Central European States

This dissertation examines the institutional determinants of one set of countries - the former socialist states in South East and Central Europe. It is motivated by the observation that fifteen years after the beginning of transition we see a divergence in the institutional performance of the transition countries. The Balkan (South East European states) have been consistently lagging behind the Central European states. Why is there such a substantial difference in the performance and level of institutions in these two sets of former socialist countries? Unlike the sparse existing literature, which attempt to answer this question, this dissertation identifies the Ottoman and Habsburg historical legacies, rather than the socialist legacy, as a key source of divergence in institutional performance of the countries of South East and Central Europe. In Chapter 1, we identify the legacies of the Ottoman Empire and their historical origins. The chapter's main contribution is twofold. First, it identifies and discusses the origins of characteristics of the Ottoman Empire that shaped the institutional structure of its successor states. Second, the chapter analyzes the impact of these characteristics on people's behavior and incentives. Building upon the key historical dynamics identified in Chapter 1, Chapter 2 develops a stylized theoretical model of the Ottoman Empire. The model attempts to explain the rise and decline of the Empire and indirectly, the historical evolution of the Ottoman legacy. It, thereby, contributed to the literature by looking at how the Ottoman seemingly irrational and static structure could have been optimal subject to certain constraints. Chapter 3 attempts to explain the reasons for the 'great divide' in performance of the countries of South East and Central European post-socialist states. By comparing the historical developments and legacies of the Ottoman Empire with those of the Habsburg Empire, Chapter 3 draws a number of hypotheses about the effect of these legacies on current institutional performance. It presents three estimation procedures that allow us to test the hypotheses and discusses the estimation results in light of alternative theories

The Olympics, transnational law and legal transplants: the International Olympic Committee, ambush marketing and ticket touting

This paper concerns the origination, development and emergence of what might be termed ‘Olympic law’. This has an impact across borders and with transnational effect. It examines the unique process of creation of these laws, laws created by a national legislature to satisfy the commercial demands of a private body, the International Olympic Committee (IOC). It begins by critically locating the IOC and Olympic law and examining Olympic law as a transnational force. Using two case studies, those of ambush marketing and ticket touting, it demonstrates how private entities can be the drivers of specific, self-interested legislation when operating as a transnational organisation from within the global administrative space and notes the potential dangers of such legal transplants

Political trust and historical legacy: the effect of varieties of socialism

This paper, unlike the vast existing literature on political trust, focuses on trust in post-socialist countries, and more specifically on their emerging elites, rather than on their general populations. Studying emerging elites is important in the context of establishing democracy and the survival of democracy. We stipulate that political trust is significantly determined by historical legacy: type of socialist regime, accounting for path dependence and thus, for pre- socialist legacies. Utilizing individual-level data from an institutional survey, we find that distinguishing between different types of socialism is instrumental in explaining trust of emerging elites. Our findings have implications for policies aimed at fostering political trust in post-socialist countries and more importantly for discerning future patterns of political and social developments