• Selected
• Entire List

Abstract:
In the course of 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 partner's death, kept Middle Eastern commercial enterprises small and ephemeral. Second, certain European inheritance systems facilitated large and durable partnerships by reducing the likelihood of premature dissolution. The upshot is that European enterprises grew larger than those of the Islamic world. Moreover, while ever larger enterprises propelled further organizational transformations in Europe, persistently small enterprises inhibited economic modernization in the Middle East. The Middle East's far-reaching commercial reforms of the nineteenth century were meant to overcome the consequent crisis.

Abstract:
In the course of 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 partner's death, kept Middle Eastern commercial enterprises small and ephemeral. Second, certain European inheritance systems facilitated large and durable partnerships by reducing the likelihood of premature dissolution. The upshot is that European enterprises grew larger than those of the Islamic world. Moreover, while ever larger enterprises propelled further organizational transformations in Europe, persistently small enterprises inhibited economic modernization in the Middle East. The Middle East's far-reaching commercial reforms of the nineteenth century were meant to overcome the consequent crisis.

Abstract:
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 of increasing plausibility through its rising availability in public discourse. The driving mechanism involves a combination of informational and reputational motives: Individuals endorse the perception partly by learning from the apparent beliefs of others and partly by distorting their public responses in the interest of maintaining social acceptance. Availability entrepreneurs - activists who manipulate the content of public discourse - strive to trigger availability cascades likely to advance their agendas. Their availability campaigns may yield social benefits, but sometimes they bring harm, which suggests a need for safeguards. Focusing on the role of mass pressures in the regulation of risks associated with production, consumption, and the environment, Professor Timur Kuran and Cass R. Sunstein analyze availability cascades and suggest reforms to alleviate their potential hazards. Their proposals include new governmental structures designed to give civil servants better insulation against mass demands for regulatory change and an easily accessible scientific database to reduce people's dependence on popular (mis)perceptions.

availability heuristic, informational cascades, reputational cascades, cost-benefit analysis

Abstract:
The Islamic waqf appears to have emerged as a credible commitment device to give property owners economic security in return for social services. Throughout the Middle East, it long served as a major instrument for delivering public goods in a decentralized manner. In principle, the manager of a waqf had to obey the stipulations of its founder to the letter. In practice, the founder's directives were often circumvented. An unintended consequence was an erosion of the waqf system's legitimacy. In any case, legally questionable adaptations proved no substitute for the legitimate options available to corporations. As it became increasingly clear that the waqf system lacked the flexibility necessary for efficient resource utilization, governments found it ever easier to confiscate their resources. In the nineteenth century, the founding of European-inspired municipalities marked a formal repudiation of the waqf system in favor of government-coordinated systems for delivering public goods.

Abstract:
The Islamic waqf appears to have emerged as a credible commitment device to give property owners economic security in return for social services. Throughout the Middle East, it long served as a major instrument for delivering public goods in a decentralized manner. In principle, the manager of a waqf had to obey the stipulations of its founder to the letter. In practice, the founder's directives were often circumvented. An unintended consequence was an erosion of the waqf system's legitimacy. In any case, legally questionable adaptations proved no substitute for the legitimate options available to corporations. As it became increasingly clear that the waqf system lacked the flexibility necessary for efficient resource utilization, governments found it ever easier to confiscate their resources. In the nineteenth century, the founding of European-inspired municipalities marked a formal repudiation of the waqf system in favor of government-coordinated systems for delivering public goods.

Abstract:
A communities culture is defined by the preferences and equilibrium behaviors of its members. Contacts among communities alter individual cultures through two interrelated mechanisms: behavioral adaptations driven by pay-offs to coordination, and preference changes shaped by socialization and self-persuasion. This paper explores the workings of these mechanisms through a model of cultural integration in which preferences and behaviors vary continuously. It identifies a broad set of conditions under which cross-cultural contacts promote cultural hybridization. The analysis suggests that policies to support social integration serve to homogenize preferences across communities, thereby undermining a key objective of multiculturalism. Yielding fresh insights into strategies pursued to influence cultural trends, it also shows that communities benefit from having other communities adjust their behaviors.

Abstract:
A community's culture is defined by the preferences and equilibrium behaviors of its members. Contacts among communities alter individual cultures through two mechanisms: behavioral adaptations driven by payoffs to coordination and preference changes shaped by socialization and self-persuasion. This paper explores the workings of these mechanisms through a model of cultural integration in which preferences and behaviors vary continuously. It identifies a broad set of conditions under which cross-cultural contacts promote cultural hybridization. Limiting outcomes are independent of the conformity pressures within the constituent cultures. The analysis suggests that efforts to preserve existing cultures conflict with policies helpful to social integration. It also shows that communities benefit from having other communities adjust their behaviors,
yielding fresh insights into strategies pursued to influence cultural trends.

Abstract:
This article aims to expand research about perceptions of discrimination both substantively and methodologically: beyond the domains of race and ethnicity, and relying partly on Web-based surveys. Methods. Parallel surveys were conducted over the telephone and the World-Wide Web, using standard random-digit dial (RDD) techniques for the former, and a large volunteer panel for the latter. Results. Both modes, phone and Web, revealed that respondents consider discrimination based on physical appearance and economic status to be more prevalent than discrimination based on ethnicity. Respondents also reported that they themselves have been victimized more by physical appearance and economic status discrimination than by ethnic discrimination. Significant differences emerged between the phone and Web respondent pools, even after controlling for such independent variables as age, race, education level, and gender. The findings suggest that people are more willing to reveal knowledge about controversial social phenomena on the Web than on the phone.
World-Wide Web, internet, phone survey, knowledge falsification, social desirability bias, selection bias

Discrimination, ethnicity, physical appearance, beauty, economic inequality, public opinion, mode effect,

Abstract:
The historical record belies the claim that Islam impeded entrepreneurship by inculcating conformism and fatalism. However, the diametrically opposed view that Islamic institutions are necessarily supportive of entrepreneurship flies in the face of the historical transformations associated with economic modernization. Islamic institutions that served innovators well in the medieval global economy became dysfunctional as the world made the transition from personal to impersonal exchange. The key problem is that Islamic law failed to stimulate the development of organizational forms conducive to pooling and managing resources on a large scale.

Entrepreneurship, Middle East, Islam, development, business history

Abstract:
A large telephone survey conducted after the attacks of September 11 suggests that the willingness to tolerate discrimination varies significantly across domains, with a very high tolerance of discrimination against poorly educated immigrants and a strikingly low tolerance of discrimination against the genetically disadvantaged. Regardless of domain, tolerance is greater among men than among women. A survey conducted simultaneously over the World-Wide Web, using volunteer panels, replicated the phone survey results and revealed an even larger sex gap. This finding suggests that a social desirability bias leads women to overstate and men to understate their tolerance of discrimination in public.

Discrimination, sex differences, surveys, public opinion, social desirability bias

Abstract:
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 responsible for a civilization's observed trajectory involves, therefore, causal relationships that cross the often-postulated cultural-material divide. Complementarities make it difficult to transplant institutions across civilizations on a piecemeal basis. They imply that reforms designed to jump start an economy will fail unless they are comprehensive. Civilizational analysis can benefit, therefore, from attention to institutional complementarities, including ones involving both cultural and material variables.

civilization, culture, economic development, institution, institutional complementarity

Abstract:
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 processes that delayed the diffusion of the corporation to the Middle East even as its role in the global economy expanded. Community building was central to Islam's mission, so early Muslim jurists had no use for a concept liable to facilitate factionalism. Services with large setup costs and expected to last indefinitely were supplied through the waqf, an unincorporated trust. The waqf thus absorbed resources that might otherwise have stimulated an incorporation movement. Partly because the waqf spawned constituencies committed to preserving its key features, until modern times private merchants and producers who stood to profit from corporate powers were unable to muster the collective action necessary to reform the legal system. For their part, Muslim rulers took no initiatives of their own to supply the corporate form of organization, because they saw no commercial or financial organizations worth developing for the sake of boosting tax revenue.

Islam, Middle East, development, partnership, joint-stock company, corporation, organization, individualism, law

Abstract:
Although a millennium ago the Middle East was not an economic laggard, by the 18th century it exhibited clear signs of economic backwardness. The reason for this transformation is that certain components of the region's legal infrastructure stagnated as their Western counterparts gave way to the modern economy. Among the institutions that generated evolutionary bottlenecks are the Islamic law of inheritance, which inhibited capital accumulation; the absence in Islamic law of the concept of a corporation and the consequent weaknesses of civil society; and the waqf, which locked vast resources into unproductive organizations for the delivery of social services. All of these obstacles to economic development were largely overcome through radical reforms initiated in the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, traditional Islamic law remains a factor in the Middle East's ongoing economic disappointments. The weakness of the region's private economic sectors and its human capital deficiency stand among the lasting consequences of traditional Islamic law.

Abstract:
Ethnic norms are the behavioral codes that individuals must follow to retain the acceptance of their ethnic groups. They are sustained partly by sanctions that individuals impose on each other in trying to establish personally advantageous ethnic credentials. This essay analyzes the process of "ethnification" through which a society's ethnic norms become more demanding. The key to the argument lies in interdependencies among individual behaviors. These interdependencies allow changes in one person's choices to trigger vast numbers of additional adjustments through a reputational cascade ? a self-reinforcing process by which people concerned about their reputations induce each other to step up their ethnically symbolic activities. According to the analysis, a society exhibiting low ethnic activity generates social forces tending to preserve that condition; but if these forces are somehow overcome, the result may be massive ethnification. One implication is that societies only slightly different in terms of age distribution, economic development, or culture may vary greatly in terms of aggregate ethnic activity. Another is that ethnically based fears and hatreds constitute by-products of ethnification rather than its fundamental source.

Abstract:
Ethnic norms are the behavioral codes that individuals must follow to retain the acceptance of their ethnic groups. They are sustained partly by sanctions that individuals impose on each other in trying to establish personally advantageous ethnic credentials. This essay analyzes the process of "ethnification" through which a society's ethnic norms become more demanding. The key to the argument lies in interdependencies among individual behaviors. These interdependencies allow changes in one person's choices to trigger vast numbers of additional adjustments through a reputational cascade - a self-reinforcing process by which people concerned about their reputations induce each other to step up their ethnically symbolic activities. According to the analysis, a society exhibiting low ethnic activity generates social forces tending to preserve that condition; but if these forces are somehow overcome, the result may be massive ethnification. One implication is that societies only slightly different in terms of age distribution, economic development, or culture may vary greatly in terms of aggregate ethnic activity. Another is that ethnically based fears and hatreds constitute by-products of ethnification rather than its fundamental source.

Abstract:
In the nineteenth century the steps taken to modernize the Middle East's financial system included the legalization of interest, the establishment of secular courts open to both actual and juristic persons, and new banking regulations based largely on Western models. Exploring why they involved the transplant of foreign institutions, this paper shows that certain elements of Islamic law blocked evolutionary paths that might have generated a modern financial system through indigenous means. These sources of rigidity included (1) the Islamic law of commercial partnerships, which limited enterprise continuity; (2) the Islamic inheritance system, which restrained capital accumulation; (3) the waqf (pious foundation) system, which inhibited the pooling of resources; and (4) the Islamic legal system's aversion to the concept of juristic personality, which limited the capabilities of private organizations. Even before the financial advances of the nineteenth century, the region's non-Muslim minorities had come to dominate key economic sectors, including finance. Non-Muslim merchants and financiers improved their relative positions because, unlike their Muslim counterparts, they could operate under the jurisdiction of Western courts.

Islam, Islamic world, Middle East, development, modernization, finance, interest, bill of credit, bill of exchange, banking, partnership, inheritance law, cash waqf, minorities

Abstract:
In the nineteenth century the Middle East's Christian and Jewish minorities registered conspicuous economic advances relative to the Muslim majority. These advances are generally linked to trans-national networks stretching into Western Europe. Left unclear is why non-Muslims joined these networks in vastly disproportionate numbers and why the networks proved especially lucrative in the early modern era. The missing link is the choice of law available to non-Muslim subjects. Until the late eighteenth century, on matters critical to financial and commercial success non-Muslims tended to exercise this privilege in favor of Islamic law; and this pattern prompted their own court systems to emulate Islamic legal practices. However, as Western Europe developed the legal infrastructure of modern capitalism, vast numbers of Christians and Jews made jurisdictional switches by obtaining the protection of European states. Along with tax concessions, they thus gained the ability to conduct business under Western laws.

Islam, Islamic World, Middle East, Economic Development, Modernization, Choice of Law, Legal Pluralism, Minorities, Christians, Armenians, Greeks, Jews, Muslims, Partnership, Courts, Banking, Commerce, Inheritance