This text studies transaction cost economics, influential in economic thought on how institutions work. Whereas orthodox economics describes the firm in technological terms, as a production function, transaction cost economics describes it in organizational terms, as a governance structure.

Corporate Governance is a text which considers the problems surrounding governance and proposes solutions to help restore investor confidence in the corporate world. The book is intended for board members, corporate executives, regulators, auditors, creditors and analysts seeking a concise analysis of the governance issues facing financial and non-financial corporations round the world. The book is fully international in context and includes real-life examples and cases to emphasize the practical nature of governance problems and solutions.

This volume is devoted to the analysis of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and its role in international and national policy making. On its 50th anniversary, the OECD enjoys widely acknowledged international standing. Despite this, it has so far remained a rarely researched and analyzed organization. This book is thus a pioneering work: it fills a long-overdue gap in presenting a theoretically guided and empirically rich analysis of the OECD as apolitical actor. It explores its role in political processes through various case studies in a variety of policy fields. By conceptualizing the contributions to this volume around the concept of mechanisms of governance, it explores how and to what extent the OECD provides international incentives fornational policy making. The volume collects a set of ten contributions on the OECD and its activities in core fields of its commitment as an 'economic organization', such as economic and labor market policy, tax issues, finance or financial crime, but also in complementary fields in which the organization is active today despite its original economic focus, such as education, biotechnology, health, family issues, and migration. The case studies presented in this volume are an interdisciplinarycollection from different academic perspectives, including political science, international relations, law, and organization studies. The book provides a current and wide-ranging analysis of this organization including its constraints and opportunities in policy making.

This edited volume provides a comprehensive overview of the diverse and multi-faceted research on governance in multilevel systems. The book features a collection of cutting-edge trans-Atlantic contributions, covering topics such as federalism, decentralization as well as various forms and processes of regionalization and Europeanization. While the field of multilevel governance is comparatively young, research in the subject has also come of age as considerable theoretical, conceptual and empirical advances have been achieved since the first influential works were published in the early noughties. The present volume aims to gauge the state-of-the-art in the different research areas as it brings together a selection of original contributions that are united by a variety of configurations, dynamics and mechanisms related to governing in multilevel systems.

From the first stock markets of Amsterdam,London, and New York to the billions of electronic commerce transactions today, privately produced and enforced economic regulations are more common, more effective, and more promising than commonly considered. In Private Governance, prominent economist Edward Stringham presents case studies of the various forms of private enforcement, self-governance, or self-regulation among private groups or individuals that fill a void that government enforcement cannot. Through analytical narratives the book provides a close examination of the world's first stock markets, key elements of which were unenforceable by law; the community of Celebration, Florida, and other private communities that show how public goods can be bundled with land and provided more effectively; and the millions of credit-card transactions that occur daily and are regulated by private governance. Private Governance ultimately argues that while potential problems of private governance, such as fraud, are pervasive, so are the solutions it presents, and that much of what is orderly in the economy can be attributed to private groups and individuals. With meticulous research, Stringham demonstrates that private governance is a far more common source of order than most people realize, and that private parties have incentives to devise different mechanisms for eliminating unwanted behavior. Private Governance documents numerous examples of private order throughout history to illustrate how private governance is more resilient to internal and external pressure than is commonly believed. Stringham discusses why private governance has economic and social advantages over relying on government regulations and laws, and explores the different mechanisms that enable private governance, including sorting, reputation, assurance, and other bonding mechanisms. Challenging and rigorously-written, Private Governance will make a compelling read for those with an interest in economics, political philosophy, and the history of current Wall Street regulations.

This book offers a major new theory of global governance, explaining both its rise and what many see as its current crisis. The author suggests that world politics is now embedded in a normative and institutional structure dominated by hierarchies and power inequalities and therefore inherently creates contestation, resistance, and distributional struggles. Within an ambitious and systematic new conceptual framework, the theory makes four key contributions. Firstly, it reconstructs global governance as a political system which builds on normative principles and reflexive authorities. Second, it identifies the central legitimation problems of the global governance system with a constitutionalist setting in mind. Third, it explains the rise of state and societal contestation by identifying key endogenous dynamics and probing the causal mechanisms that produced them. Finally, it identifies the conditions under which struggles in the global governance system lead to decline or deepening. Rich with propositions, insights, and evidence, the book promises to be the most important and comprehensive theoretical argument about world politics of the 21st century.

Tackles one of the most enduring and contentious issues of positive political economy: common pool resource management.