There have been repeated claims that informal institutions play an important or even crucial role in economic development. Yet measuring informal institutions entails serious challenges. This paper identifies the difficulties in measuring informal institutions, critically discusses some attempts hitherto taken and encourages the more intensive use of experiments to measure them.

For various reasons, governments sometimes fail to provide public goods. Private provision of such goods might then be used if it succeeds in overcoming three main problems: high organization costs, the assurance problem, and the free-rider problem. We argue that technologies that enable crowdfunding – the method of funding projects by raising small amounts of money from a large number of people via the internet – have enabled these problems to be overcome more readily. Such technology has lowered organization costs and enabled the employment of more efficient mechanisms to reduce the assurance and free-rider problems. To illustrate these effects, we present two case studies of private provision of public goods via crowdfunding: police services in Rockridge in Oakland, California, and the Ukraine Army.

While most scholars emphasize the role of prosocial motivations of contributors in building open online communities, we show that mere users also adhere to their norms of behaviour to some extent. To this end we designed an original experimentation protocol. With the help of the French Wikimédia Foundation, we questioned a large sample (n = 13,000) of Wikipedia users (whether contributors or not). They were invited, after having expressing their feelings about Wikipédia, to play a Dictator Game. A large proportion of respondents, including those who were merely users, chose an equal split (66% of the sample). This surprising result suggests that they have adhered to a social norm of sharing. Investigating the determinants of this result, we prove that an involvement measured by usage (intensity and variety), as well as by attachment to, and time spent, on Wikipedia, is correlated with the choice of the 50/50 split in the dictator game (DG). Furthermore, the method of instrumental variables gives an indication that adherence to the social norm of sharing may be endogenously determined by involvement in the open online community. Our result highlights the importance of interactions with the institutional and technical frameworks of the community.

The hypothesis that institutional factors affect real economic growth has received support in both the theoretical and empirical literature. Globalization has also, though not unanimously, been found to affect growth outcomes. Bridging the gap between the two strands of the literature, this paper investigates the existence and strength of the interaction between institutional quality and globalization on real economic growth using a panel dataset covering 82 countries and spanning 25 years (1986–2010). Dimensionality reduction techniques are employed to identify key components of ‘institutional quality’: the rule of law, civil liberties and political rights. The empirical results reveal that while ‘institutional quality’ robustly and positively affects growth, the direct effect of economic globalization is not significant and the interaction effects, perhaps as a consequence, are muted over the review period. Direct and interaction effects of institutional quality and economic globalization on growth are, however, observed for the sub-sample of developing countries.

The paper builds an integrative framework of the moral dimensions of the employment relationship by linking the core specificities of the employment relationship, i.e. the meaningfulness of work, its relational components, the incompleteness of the labour contract and its authority character, to the four moral motives identified by the Moral Foundations Theory, namely care, fairness/reciprocity, in-group/loyalty and authority. We show that due acknowledgement of the moral dimensions of the employment relationship entails making institutional transformations, namely strengthening rather than discarding employment law and reforming corporate law. Recognizing these moral dimensions would epitomize a radical break with mainstream economics and neo-liberal thought.

To what extent do imposed institutions shape preferences? We consider this issue by comparing the market-versus-state attitudes of respondents from a capitalist country, Finland, and from an ex-communist group of Baltic countries, and by arguing that the period of communist rule can be viewed as an ‘experiment’ in institutional imposition. We find that, consistent with some earlier related work, citizens from ex-communist countries tend to be more supportive of state ownership than respondents from capitalist economies. However, they also favour increasing inequality and competition as the means to enhance incentives. We conclude that, in some important relevant dimensions, institutional imposition (which lasted for about 50 years) had a limited effect on preferences.

Scholars across the social sciences have debated whether resource dependence curses or blesses national development prospects, with a growing consensus on mixed outcomes and the centrality of institutions. Mainstream literature, however, falls short in depicting what the resource curse entails: the claim that “institutions matter” usually has a narrow meaning that largely overlooks the significance of place. A review of the paved road in research reveals a need to critically integrate approaches to studying the curse, as well as more insightful research on which institutions matter, how, and where. Expounding six governance challenges and thirteen development traps, I set out a simple yet crucial lesson: resource-based development presents both blessings and curses for any given resource-rich country in any given time period, and institutions are likely to be part of the explanation. I sketch how a “context matters” framework could guide future research, with illustrations from the Latin American experience.

Different personal attributes have been considered to account for judicial policy preferences around the world: ideology, age, gender, race, religion, language and professional background. The appointment of foreign judges is a particularly rare characteristic since most countries do not entertain such a possibility. We use the specific case of the Constitutional Court of Andorra to test the extent to which foreign-appointed judges make a difference, and particularly whether they are more or less inclined to favour local petitioners. An empirical analysis of the entire population of abstract review cases in the period 1993–2016 does not indicate a strong statistical effect.