Journal articlePublic Choice · March 1, 2020
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One of Islam’s five canonical pillars is a predictable, fixed, and mildly progressive tax system called zakat. It was meant to finance various causes typical of a pre-modern government. Implicit in the entire transfer system was personal property rights as ...
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Journal articleJournal of Economic Literature · December 1, 2018
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This essay critically evaluates the analytic literature concerned with causal connections between Islam and economic performance. It focuses on works since 1997, when this literature was last surveyed comprehensively. Among the findings are the following: ...
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Journal articleAmerican Journal of Comparative Law · July 1, 2016
In the legal system of the premodern Middle East, the closest thing to an autonomous private organization was the Islamic waqf. This non-state institution inhibited political participation, collective action, and rule of law, among other indicators of demo ...
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Journal articleEconomic Development and Cultural Change · April 1, 2013
The article explores the historical origins of Muslim underrepresentation in the management of large Indian firms. Muslims found it relatively harder to pool capital within large and durable enterprises capable of exploiting the new technologies of the ind ...
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Journal articleSouthern Economic Journal · April 2012
Key institutions of the pre-modern Middle Eastern economy, all grounded in Islamic law,
blocked the development of democratic institutions. This talk identifies three mechanisms that played
critical roles. Islam's original tax system failed to produce las ...
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Journal articleSouthern Economic Journal · April 1, 2012
Key institutions of the pre-modern Middle Eastern economy, all grounded in Islamic law, blocked the development of democratic institutions. This talk identifies three mechanisms that played critical roles. Islam's original tax system failed to produce last ...
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Journal articleJournal of Economic Behavior and Organization · September 1, 2009
A civilization constitutes a durable social system of complementary traits. Some of the complementarities of any given civilization are between elements of "material" life and ones commonly treated as integral to "culture." Identifying the mechanisms respo ...
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Journal articleAfrique Contemporaine · November 4, 2008
Can worldwide disparities in levels of development be explained by institutional or cultural factors? In Timur Kuran's view, the belated development of the Middle East may be explained by structural factors embedded in Islamic institutions rather than in I ...
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Journal articleReview of Economic Studies · January 1, 2008
A community's culture is defined by the preferences and equilibrium behaviours of its members. Contacts among communities alter individual cultures through two interrelated mechanisms: behavioural adaptations driven by pay-offs to coordination, and prefere ...
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Journal articleAmerican Journal of Comparative Law · January 1, 2005
Classical Islamic law recognizes only natural persons; it does not grant standing to corporations. This article explores why Islamic law did not develop a concept akin to the corporation, or borrow one from another legal system. It also identifies processe ...
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Journal articleJournal of Economic Behavior and Organization · January 1, 2005
In the 19th century, financial reforms in the Middle East included the legalization of interest, the establishment of secular courts, and banking regulations, all based on Western models. Exploring why foreign institutions were transplanted, this article s ...
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Journal articleSocial Science Quarterly · September 1, 2004
This article aims to expand research about perceptions of discrimination both substantively and methodologically beyond the domains of race and ethnicity, relying partly on web-based surveys. Methods. We conducted parallel surveys over the telephone and th ...
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Journal articleJournal of Legal Studies · June 1, 2004
In the nineteenth century, the Middle East's Christian and Jewish minorities registered conspicuous economic advances relative to the Muslim majority. These advances were made possible by the choice of law available to non-Muslim subjects. Until the late e ...
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Journal articleJournal of Economic History · June 1, 2003
During the second millennium, the Middle East's commerce with Western Europe fell increasingly under European domination. Two factors played critical roles. First, the Islamic inheritance system, by raising the costs of dissolving a partnership following a ...
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Journal articleStanford Law Review · January 1, 1999
An availability cascade is a self-reinforcing process of collective belief formation by which an expressed perception triggers a chain reaction that gives the perception increasing plausibility through its rising availability in public discourse. The drivi ...
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Journal articleJournal of Legal Studies · January 1, 1998
Ethnic norms are the ethnically symbolic behavioral codes that individuals must follow to retain social acceptance. They are sustained partly by sanctions that individuals impose on each other in trying to establish good credentials. This essay analyzes th ...
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Journal articleJournal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics · March 1997
The world's predominantly Muslim countries have long been underdeveloped. This paper classifies, critiques, and extends the mechanisms that have been proposed as explanations for the pattern. One mechanism involves the use of Islam to legitimize worldviews ...
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Journal articleJournal of Economic Perspectives · November 1, 1995
Although Islamic economics was developed to serve cultural and political ends, efforts have been made to put its ideals into practice. There now exist Islamic banks, which claim to offer an interest-free alternative to conventional banking, and go ...
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Journal articleConstitutional Political Economy · December 1, 1993
Public opinion breeds tyranny by forcing individuals to refrain from voicing their genuine thoughts and feelings. The means used to mitigate such tyranny include the separation of governmental powers, the ethic of tolerance, and the secret ballot. Yet neit ...
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Journal articleRationality and Society · January 1, 1993
When people misrepresent their beliefs in response to social pressures, public discourse gets impoverished. Because public discourse is a basic determinant of individual perceptions and understandings, a by-product is the distortion of private knowledge. T ...
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Journal articlePublic Choice · April 1, 1989
A feature shared by certain major revolutions is that they were not anticipated. Here is an explanation, which hinges on the observation that people who come to dislike their government are apt to hide their desire for change as long as the opposition seem ...
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Journal articleJournal of Economic Behavior and Organization · January 1, 1988
A number of theories have been developed to explain why societies do not always adapt to changing conditions. These are critiqued here, with an emphasis on their substantive and methodological differences. Some theories ascribe lack of adaptation to person ...
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Journal articlePublic Choice · January 1, 1987
A model is presented of an open-voting public choice process that features pressure groups vying for society's support. Individuals choose what policy to advocate on the basis of their private preferences, which are those they would express in a secret bal ...
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Journal articleEconomic Inquiry · January 1, 1986
Even if inflation is perfectly anticipated, a firm that finds nominal price adjustments sufficiently costly will reset its price at multi‐period intervals. Consequently, its average output will change in a direction that depends on properties of its profit ...
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Journal articleJournal of Economic Behavior and Organization · January 1, 1983
At the heart of the contemporary Islamic doctrine of economics lies a set of behavioral norms derived from the first Islamic society in seventh century Arabia. This paper demonstrates that these norms cannot be expected to serve as the spearhead of a drive ...
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