This paper offers the first comprehensive analysis of legal change in the protection of shareholder and creditor rights in transition economies and its impact on the propensity of firms to raise external finance. Following La Porta et al. (1998), the paper constructs an expanded set of legal indices to capture a range of potential conflicts between different stakeholders of the firm. It supplem...

This paper studies the tensions between egalitiarian sentiments, equity concerns, self-interest, and the need for incentives in a society. We propose an experimental game in which subjects can assign their endowment to private or (more efficient) group production activities, with the proceeds from group activity divided either equally, in proportion to contribution, or by combination of the two...

Human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) reverse transcriptase (RT) uses host tRNA(Lys) partially annealed to the primer binding site (PBS) as primer for the initiation of cDNA synthesis. When assaying cDNA synthesis with a template-primer complex formed by an RNA fragment carrying the PBS site and bovine tRNA(Lys) we noticed that an excess of primer tRNA inhibited strongly the DNA polymerase activit...

This paper addresses the issue of causality in the relationship between various types of institutions—namely, political and economic freedom—and long-run economic growth. It is shown that existing empirical studies of these relationships provide evidence of correlation, but not causation. Granger causality tests of freedom vs. growth, and freedom vs. investment are conducted using aggregate mea...

One theory argues that state ownership of infrastructure is greater in poor countries because the social returns from investment exceed the private returns by a wider margin. Another theory argues that state ownership is greater when legal and political institutions provide weak enforcement of private property rights or weak limits on government excess. I test these theories using cross-country...