Political reforms can be understood as the reconfiguration of formal institutions. The rational choice of formal institutions is the core topic of the New Institutional Economics research program. While bounded rationality is a core assumption of the New Institutional Economics and the reason for suboptimal behavior there, additional reference is made to the individual aspiration to intraperson...

Regional integration remains among the main topics of international discourse in Central Asia, though the progress of international cooperation is very limited. Our aim is to understand the connection between the organization of economic institutions in Central Asia and the regional integration. The existing literature has explored the state level of integration in great detail: varying from ra...

This paper evaluates the importance of “property rights institutions”, which protect citizens against expropriation by the government and powerful elites, and “contracting institutions”, which enable private contracts between citizens. We exploit exogenous variation in both types of institutions driven by colonial history, and document strong firststage relationships between property rights ins...

This paper defines a specific plan which allows two separate institutions, with different capabilities, to function as a single receiving entity in the event of a mass casualty incident. The street between the two institutions will be closed to traffic and a two-phase process initiated. Arriving ambulances will first be quickly screened to expedite the most critical patients followed by formal ...

BACKGROUND Service providers' attitudes towards recovery can improve with formal training. However, it is unclear whether improvements depend on dispositional hope. AIMS To determine whether attitudinal improvements following formal recovery training vary depending on participants' dispositional hope. METHOD One hundred and three providers attended formal recovery training and completed mea...