Welfare conditionality where social security payments are conditional on recipients undertaking tasks such as training, submitting job applications and taking part in “work-like” activities, is an enduring punitive feature of contemporary welfare provision global North economics. In Australia, or mutual obligation it commonly referred to, continually targeted at specific groups single women Fir...

Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson (2001) (hereafter, AJR) is a seminal article that has reinvigorated debate over the relationship between property rights and economic growth. Following Knack and Keefer (1995), Mauro (1995), La Porta et al. (1998), Hall and Jones (1999), Rodrik (1999), and others, AJR endeavors to determine the causal effect of institutions that protect property rights, measured ...

A major governance problem in closely-held corporations arising from the illiquidity of shares is the majority shareholders’ expropriation of minority shareholders. As a solution, legal and finance research recommends that the main shareholder surrender some control to minority shareholders via ownership rights. We test this proposition on a large dataset of closely-held corporations. We find t...

Entrepreneurs who start new firms may choose not-for-profit status as a means of committing to soft incentives. Such incentives protect donors, volunteers, consumers and employees from ex post expropriation of profits by the entrepreneur. We derive conditions under which completely self-interested entrepreneurs opt for not-for-profit status, despite the fact that this status limits their abilit...

High quality institutions, such as rule of law, bureaucratic quality, freedom from government expropriation, and freedom from government repudiation of contracts, mitigate the adverse economic consequences of ethnic fractionalization identified by Easterly and Levine 1997 and others. In countries with sufficiently good institutions, ethnic diversity does not lower growth or worsen economic poli...

In this paper, we address two questions: (i) Why do developing countries with the highest growth rates export capital; and (ii) Why are some countries unable or unwilling to pursue the high growth/low debt strategies that has proven successful for many “miracle” economies. The model we study is a small open economy subject to political economy and contracting frictions. The political economy fr...

In this paper we examine the influence of minority expropriation on disclosure level in France where shareholders are poorly protected and the main agency problem is the one between controlling and minority shareholders (type II conflict) while prior studies have been undertaken in the United States, in a context of ownership dispersion and high investor protection where the main agency conflic...

This paper uses a data set of industry-level equity returns from both developed and emerging markets to investigate whether the quality of the institutional environment recently shown to affect capital markets’ size also affects the expected return on equity. The paper documents that the required rate of return on equity is negatively associated with the enforceability of contracts and the impa...

Should Egalitarians Expropriate Philanthropists? Wealthy individuals often voluntarily provide public goods that the poor also consume. Such philanthropy is perceived as legitimizing one’s wealth. Governments routinely exempt the rich from taxation on grounds of their charitable expenditure. We examine the normative logic of this exemption. We show that, rather than reducing it, philanthropy ma...