The blockchain economics literature often models consensus participants as anonymous, interchangeable agents operating without institutional context. This paper argues that this ‘permissionless’ assumption describes open admission but abstracts from governance over rule change. Once governance is restored, mutable blockchain systems face a standard commitment problem: rule-changing coalitions may revise protocol rules after participants make chain-specific investments. The paper develops this claim through a comparative-institutional analysis of eight public blockchain systems and two illustrative cases: the BTC Core governance episode and the Ethereum DAO intervention. TCP/IP provides the institutional comparator: technical systems can evolve extensively while preserving base-layer semantic fixedness. Once governance is included, blockchain security is constrained not only by consensus costs but also by institutional commitment conditions: base-layer fixedness, coalition concentration, coordination thresholds, and identity-linked accountability.

Michael Jensen’s late-career work on integrity is often interpreted as a departure from agency theory or as an attempt to introduce ethical considerations into a positive framework. This paper argues instead that integrity can be reconstructed as an extension internal to agency theory itself. Drawing on the Jensen and Meckling decomposition of agency costs, integrity is modelled as a bonding cost; a self-imposed constraint that raises the private cost of opportunistic behaviour and thereby economises on monitoring and reduces residual loss. Incorporating Buchanan’s constitutional-stage logic, the analysis shows that integrity relocates rational optimisation to the choice of rules rather than to particular transactions. Integrity is further classified as an informal institution whose effectiveness depends on decentralised enforcement and institutional context. The paper concludes that integrity is neither an ethical supplement nor a scalable substitute for formal governance, but a bounded informal bonding mechanism whose effectiveness attenuates with organisational scale.

This study examines whether centralisation of environmental regulatory authority improves air quality by addressing governance failures in decentralised systems. Exploiting the staggered provincial implementation of China’s environmental regulatory centralisation reform as a quasi-natural experiment, we employ a difference-in-differences framework with granular grassroots-level data to identify causal effects. Results demonstrate that centralisation substantially reduces particulatematter concentrations through three mechanisms: reducing elite capture by insulating decisions from local networks and corruption, correcting incentive-driven data manipulation as evidenced by convergence between satellite and official measurements, and internalising cross-jurisdictional externalities by aligning regulatory scope with pollution diffusion. Heterogeneity analysis reveals that pollution reductions are concentrated in regions with greater pollution severity and deeper corruption, whereas differences in economic development and industrial structure play a comparatively modest role. These findings advance institutional economics by providing causal evidence that governance structure reforms addressing elite capture and principal-agent problems can generate marked environmental improvements, with implications for regulatory design in developing economies facing weak local institutional capacity.

This paper elucidates the firm and corporation’s institutional coevolution via the firm-corporation linkage debate between legal institutionalism (LI) and world power system theory (WPS). To drive a sustainability transition, it proposes ‘regenerative characteristics’ – extending multidomain, multitemporal, and ecosystem characteristics. Employing a transdisciplinary approach, the study synthesises LI’s ‘emergentist’ and WPS’s ‘separation’ views through comparative institutional analysis (CIA). Integrating corporate actor theory with an Ostromian perspective, it extends CIA to identify position as the generative mechanism linking micro-level actions to macro-level institutions. Theoretically, law structures coevolutionary governance, joint production demands an agreement of joint responsibility, and ‘negotiated governance’ emphasises capability evolution. Rejecting shareholder primacy, policies must tie legal recognition to external responsibilities, foster education for moral judgement, and incentivise regenerative characteristics. Ultimately, negotiated governance transforms the firm-corporation linkage into a responsible constituent of the global commons.

Blockchain is frequently proposed as a solution to tenure insecurity, administrative inefficiencies, and corruption, where conventional land reforms have fallen short. However, evidence of its institutional effectiveness remains limited. Drawing on Williamsonian transaction cost economics and an analytical autoethnographic research design, we undertake a comparative analysis of blockchain’s ability to curb opportunism and safeguard the interests of land-transacting parties relative to Ghana’s customary and statutory land-governance structures. Our findings show that while blockchain performs well at some ex ante safeguards, it offers no clear advantage over existing governance structures at the ex post stage. Of the seven identified forms of post-transaction opportunism that buyers often face, blockchain was superior only in minimising hold-up risks. We conclude with implications for policymakers and technologists considering blockchain adoption.

Corruption persists because feedback between individual behaviour, social norms, and institutional rules creates self-reinforcing dynamics. Although laboratory experiments provide growing evidence on anti-corruption interventions, this literature remains fragmented, failing to explain why enforcement succeeds in some contexts and fails in others. To address this gap, this paper develops a Dynamic Corruption Equilibrium (DCE) Framework. Drawing on a Bibliometric-Systematic Review of 132 experimental studies, it identifies six intervention classes across institutional, social, and individual levels, with behavioural dispositions acting as cross-cutting moderators. While existing studies examine these interventions in isolation, overlooking cross-level interactions and behavioural heterogeneity, the DCE Framework integrates insights from complex adaptive systems theory and institutional economics to conceptualise corruption as a dynamic, multi-level system. By specifying three mechanisms: cross-level feedback loops, conditional pathways, and system bistability, the framework explains how corruption equilibria become self-reinforcing or shift, offering a diagnostic lens for analysing intervention effectiveness within complex institutional environments.

This study examines how political constraints influence happiness using entropy balancing on data from 125 countries over the period 2006–2021. The findings reveal a positive and statistically significant relationship. A one-standard-deviation increase in political constraints (0.233) is associated with an approximate 0.10-unit increase in happiness, corresponding to a standardised effect of 0.092 standard deviations. While this absolute effect size is modest, as is typical for macro-institutional variables, it carries population-level relevance when contextualised within the subjective well-being literature. These results remain robust across alternative measures of political constraints, diverse model specifications, heterogeneity analyses, and alternative estimation methods. Finally, we identify political and economic freedom, control of corruption, the rule of law, income redistribution, and employment as the main channels through which political constraints affect citizens’ happiness.

This study develops a network-level model of banking alliances by integrating neo-institutional isomorphism and tie strength theory. Based on an integrative review of 98 empirical studies and deductive–inductive content analysis, the model explains how institutional pressures and relational mechanisms shape alliance portfolios among interconnected banking actors. The analysis identifies recurring patterns: strong-tie alliances, such as mergers and acquisitions and joint ventures, appear more often under high coercive and normative isomorphism, whereas moderately and loosely coupled alliances, including information sharing and outsourcing, are more common where institutional alignment is weaker and uncertainty is higher.

We argue that repugnance can, in some cases, be strategically used as a resource by some ‘entrepreneurs’ who can use it to advance their own goals. To understand the conditions in which repugnance can be strategically used, we first propose a conceptual framework to characterize repugnance-related transactions and emphasize how concerned individuals devise narratives to manage these situations, increase (or even decrease) artificially their acceptability, and ultimately justify their behaviour. This framework, which combines relational proximity and the strength of social consensus surrounding a transaction, allows for predicting the costs of developing appropriate narratives. Then, we analyse four rationales by which entrepreneurial individuals exploit and use strategically repugnant dimensions. Repugnance can be strategically leveraged as a barrier to entry, a tool for niche differentiation, a mechanism of political and market polarization, and a means of attracting attention, thereby shaping competition, regulation, and visibility across markets and platforms.

This paper examines how Regional Internet Registries (RIRs) function as self-governing institutions for managing Internet address resources and what episodes of stress reveal about the resilience and vulnerabilities of this system. Our analysis offers an institutional assessment of the RIR system and evaluates how it has responded to scarcity, technological change, and market pressures. We argue that the RIR model endures because its rules reflect Ostromian principles, including clearly defined boundaries, community participation, and credible monitoring, that sustain cooperation. Using these principles as normative benchmarks, we identify pathways for reform that preserve the RIRs’ decentralized, member-driven governance institutions while strengthening transparency, adaptability, and cross-regional resilience.

How is an off-the-books exchange governed under strong formal regulation? This article answers this question through a mechanism-based reanalysis of 216 interviews conducted in Amsterdam and Rotterdam in 1997–1999, focusing on 46 traceable cases of undeclared or informally compensated activity. Treating the corpus as a historical welfare-state baseline, not evidence of current prevalence, this article shows that informal exchange was governed at the transaction level through three linked mechanisms. Moral norms distinguished necessity-based side activities from abusive undeclared work; trust relations filtered access to low-visibility opportunities; and community-based enforcement stabilised repeated exchange through reputation, reciprocity, monitoring, and selective exclusion. These mechanisms mattered where formal work was blocked, weakly rewarding, administratively risky, or incompatible with care obligations. This article contributes to institutional economics by specifying how informal institutions shape the legitimacy, accessibility, durability, scale, and visibility of exchange under strong formal regulation.

Cheap, disposable online identities make abuse easier to externalize. Users can harass, evade bans, amplify content through fake accounts, or abandon a damaged reputation at low cost, while other users, moderators, and platforms bear the consequences. This paper examines verified pseudonymity as an institutional response to that problem. First, I model online communities as club-governed informational commons in which incivility degrades the shared environment and raises enforcement costs. The model shows that conduct can improve when sanctions attach to a persistent pseudonymous identity and when users have future access, reputation, or governance rights at stake. Second, I compare verified pseudonymity with open pseudonymity, real-name mandates, centralized know-your-customer verification, algorithmic moderation, and no intervention. Decentralized identifiers, verifiable credentials, proof of personhood, and non-transferable standing credentials matter because they can separate authentication from public identification. Third, I add a community-currency layer that separates access to scarce attention from governance rights. The result is a governance framework in which accountability depends less on public naming than on durable standing, credible sanctions, and reusable privacy-preserving credentials.

This article develops a dynamic model of judicial behaviour in which moral alignment operates as an anti-function of judicial utility. The model assumes that moral adherence can generate disutility whenever it conflicts with legal or reputational incentives. Judges maximise a time-dependent utility function driven by normative conformity, reputational rewards, and moral dissonance. Using a system of differential equations, the analysis examines how judicial and social morality co-evolve under competing institutional incentives. The model formalises moral dissonance as an endogenous friction that both destabilises and renews institutional order, transforming moral integrity into a catalyst for normative evolution. This framework provides a micro-dynamic explanation for recurrent moral-legal tensions within judicial institutions.

How do technological breakthroughs alter the governance of common-pool resources? Economists and other social scientists have long studied commons as problems of overuse or of institutional design, dedicating less attention to how resource dynamics themselves can trigger institutional change – even across borders. This work examines a striking nineteenth-century case: Britain’s appropriation of Brazilian rubber (caoutchouc) seeds and their transplantation to Southeast Asia, an episode now widely regarded as biopiracy. Using factual and historical evidence, game-theoretic reasoning, and counterfactual analysis, it shows that vulcanisation, which increased rubber’s commercial value, exposed a vacuum in Brazil’s formal institutions and created incentives for Britain to seize rents that Brazil could not protect. The resulting shift from wild extraction to plantation cultivation expanded global output and reduced prices. Brazil’s dominance was unlikely to be sustainable under any scenario, and the unintended aggregate outcome was positive-sum, albeit with uneven consequences – a Kaldor-Hicks rather than Pareto improvement.

How does a constitutional order change over time? What are the implications of such a change? Furthermore, how do answers to these questions inform de jure (‘Big-C’) Constitutional design? Virtually every country today has a written Constitution. However, formal Constitutional design is only one avenue through which a constitutional order can change. There are also, e.g., changes in constitutionally relevant norms and conventions, judicial review, and executive orders. In a zero-transaction costs world, whether constitutional change occurs via one avenue or another makes no difference. However, with positive transaction costs, the implications for one avenue versus another can be significant. I propose a theory of constitutional change rooted in the transaction costs approach. Changes will occur whenever (a) the benefits to creating new bundles of political property rights exceed the costs of creating them and/or (b) the same is true regarding the exchange of existing bundles of those rights. When it is efficient for constitutional change to occur, it will occur via the lowest-cost avenue. Furthermore, the relative transaction costs are endogenous to the use of certain avenues vis-à-vis alternatives. Specifically, avenues that are used more frequently become relatively cheaper. This has important implications for real world Constitutional design.

What motivates small-and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to engage in environmental practices? Existing studies mainly distinguish between internal and external economic drivers of firms’ green behaviour. However, economic factors alone may provide only a partial explanation, as firms’ environmental decisions are also shaped by the broader social context in which they operate. In this paper, we examine how three key contextual actors – state, market, and community – influence SMEs’ provision of green products and services, and whether their interaction reflects the existence of a Green Social Contract between firms and society from a neo-institutionalist perspective. Using Eurobarometer survey data on SMEs combined with datasets on citizens’ eco-social attitudes and countries’ institutional and economic characteristics, the analysis shows that SMEs’ green behaviour is strongly shaped by contextual factors. Formal institutional quality has a positive and significant effect, while peer market pressure and community engagement promote firms’ green behaviour and can also partially compensate for weaker formal institutions. These findings highlight the importance of policies that encourage competition and transparency among firms and strengthen citizens’ environmental and social awareness to promote the provision of green products and services by SMEs.

Childcare has held a place in national and international policy conversations in recent decades as governments seek to expand economic opportunities for women. Germany has passed several policies towards this end since reunification, including a legal right, or guarantee, for all children to have access to subsidised care. Scholars across disciplines have taken note of the regional patterns that persist in citizens’ uptake of subsidised childcare programmes. This article analyses the patterns through an institutional economics lens, applying Boettke, Coyne, and Leeson’s (2008) institutional stickiness framework to policy changes that have exhibited varying levels of success in former East and West Germany. Subsidiarity acts as a channel for institutional stickiness, allowing local values to shape both the supply of and the demand for public childcare.

Mongolia is often cited as a post-communist democratic success, yet its mineral wealth has not produced broad-based development. This article explains the paradox through the limited-access order framework of North, Wallis, and Weingast, arguing that a formally open polity coexists with an economy in which rents remain captured by a dominant coalition. Tracing the extractive sector across three stages – privatization (1990–1997), resource-nationalist contestation (1998–2012), and investor-protection rebalancing (2013–present) – it shows how three external mechanisms operating in sequence – international financial institutions, foreign direct investment, and transnational legal ordering – successively reshaped the rent structure and the coalition. Following the capacity of non-elite actors to contest rent distribution, substantive openness peaked in the 2000s and then narrowed sharply as economic policy was insulated from democratic pressure. Mongolia thus shows how mineral rents and external actors entrench limited-access logic rather than dissolving it.

This paper focuses on the bottom-up process of nation formation in multiethnic empires. The key idea is that nations emerge from a conflict over economic, political, and other resources. Under specific conditions, these conflicts give rise to coalitions based on shared ethnicity. The nation emerges if the number of ethnic-based coalitions is sufficiently large. We identify the following conditions for nations to emerge: the existence of conflict, a locally heterogeneous population, and the salience of shared ethnicity. We apply this model to account for the emergence of the Czech nation in the late Habsburg Empire and Austria-Hungary.

Populists claim to empower ‘the people’, but do they help or hinder one of the foremost arenas in which people voluntarily engage with others – civil society? We study this question using a global panel of 79 countries (1970–2019) that combines party-level populism scores with legislative ideology and six indicators of the civil-society environment. We reduce the indicators using factor analysis to two outcomes: civil-society freedom and civil-society structure. We estimate country- and year-fixed-effects models and use lagged specifications and election-year interactions as timing diagnostics to assess whether the estimates are likely to be driven by contemporaneous electoral feedback. We find that greater right-wing populist representation is consistently associated with subsequent declines in both civil-society freedom and structure, while average associations for left-wing populism are small and often indistinguishable from zero. The right-populist association is conditioned by partisan balance, being strongest where right-wing parties dominate.