Endogenous (In)Formal Institutions
Carmine Guerriero , University of Amsterdam
Although the importance of the historical strength of both norms of cooperation and efficient political institutions in shaping contemporary economic development is well documented, we still lack an organic framework which identifies the origins and isolates the separate roles of these settings. We develop a model in which a majority of ``citizens'' and a minority of ``elite'' members either invest in a new technology or try to hedge against consumption risk. Both the incentive to cheat when risk-sharing and the surplus from investment are shaped by an activity-specific factor. First, each group decides the psychological gain from cooperating which is costly to instill in its members. Then, the elite chooses the political regime: while democracy allows the citizens to fix the share of surplus to spend on the production of one of the two possible public goods, autocracy implies that the elite retains the power to set the sharing arrangement. Next, agents are matched. If two agents of the same type meet, a risk-sharing game is played, otherwise the elite decides between sharing risk and investment, which is successful only when both agents cooperate. The groups value public goods differently, and are technologically constrained in producing the one preferred by the others. Provided that these differences are sufficiently wide: 1. each factor has a first order effect only on the institution more related to the economic activity it determines; 2. cultural formation and democratization reinforce each other when showing commitment to future cooperation is necessary to bring investment; 3. technological shocks could destroy valuable institutions by affecting the related economic activity. Estimates based on data on the 11th to 17th centuries geographical features and institutions of 98 European regions are consistent with this prediction.
About the speaker
Carmine Guerriero is assistant professor at the University of Amsterdam, and fellow of the Amsterdam Center for Law and Economics. After earning a master of arts from the University of Chicago and a master of sciences from the London School of Economics, he obtained his Ph D in economics from the University of Cambridge. During 2009 he held a visiting position at the IEFE (Bocconi university). In 2007 the EARIE awarded him the “Paul Geroski” Prize for the most significant policy contribution at the EARIE annnual meeting in Valencia and in 2011 the INFRADAY the “Hans-Jurgen-Ewers-Prize" for Regulation Economics. His theoretical and empirical works have covered a variety of topics: the political economy of incentive regulation and deregulation, the determinants of different public officials appointment rules, the evolution of legal systems (with a particular focus to those pertaining to the Civil and Common law tradition), and the origins of formal and informal rules of conduct.
Venue: Conference Room
Date: 02 February 2012
Time: 12:30 - 13:30 CEST
