Several papers have recently underlined the relationship between institutional quality and international trade. Institutions are in charge of the enforcement of contracts: good institutions are those which punish the part that breaks the contract, and implement this activity with a high probability of success. Goods can be more or less complex, according to the number of intermediate inputs nee...

We provide evidence that long-term relationships between trading parties emerge endogenously in the absence of third party enforcement of contracts and are associated with a fundamental change in the nature of market interactions. Without third party enforcement, the vast majority of trades are initiated with private offers and the parties share the gains from trade equally. Low effort or bad q...

The system of contract enforcement that emerged under the Soviet dictatorship included two official and one informal institutions: administrative enforcement, the system of arbitration courts, and unofficial relational contracting. Official institutions supported transactions that targeted fulfillment of the dictator’s objective. Legal contract enforcement emerged owing to the dictator, who sou...

Electronic inter-organizational relationships are governed by contracts regulating their interaction. It is necessary to run-time monitor the contracts, as to guarantee their fulfillment as well as the enforcement of penalties in case of violations. The present work shows how to obtain a run-time monitor for contracts written in CL, a specification language that allows writing conditional oblig...

nowadays, the effort for ease of doing business is the more important worry in transition economies in the way of reaching in economic development and high competitiveness. according to intuitionalism theories, the inefficiency of judicial system causes to increase trade costs, and so, violates the business environment. by studying the rank of iran's ease in doing business between other world c...

Converting a conventional contract into an electronic equivalent that can be executed and enforced by computers is a challenging task. The difficulties are caused by the ambiguities that the original human-oriented text is likely to contain. The conversion process involves the conversion of the original text into mathematical notation. This paper discusses how standard conventional contracts ca...

This paper sets up a model to account for differences in total factor productivity due to differences in enforcement of contracts. Vertical specialization generates the need for intra-period credit, because final goods producers cannot pay their intermediate goods suppliers before they produce their final good. The paper shows that if there are enforcement problems, the capital distribution is ...

We develop a simple model of trade with imperfect contract enforcement. Courts force the execution of defaulted contracts with parametric probability. In political economic equilibrium, the enforcement of contracts between agents of sovereign nations must be at a level mutually agreed between nations. The enforcement probability may be low, with the reluctant nation being associated with low le...

This paper critiques blockchain-based “smart contracts,” which aim to automatically and securely execute obligations without reliance on a centralized enforcement authority. Though smart contracts do have some features that might serve the goals of social justice and fairness, I suggest that they are based on a thin conception of what law does, and how it does it. Smart contracts focus on the t...