great paper on costs of no rule of law
| Peter Klein |
The May 2007 issue of the Quarterly Journal of Economics featured a nice piece by Nathan Nunn, “Relationship-Specificity, Incomplete Contracts, and the Pattern of Trade.” The paper constructs an aggregate, country-level measure of asset specificity and relates it to characteristics of a country’s contract-law regime and its patterns of international trade. When asset specificity is high, firms tend to rely on contracts or vertical integration, rather than spot markets, so countries with good legal protection for contracts are more likely to specialize in the production of goods requiring specific investments.
Is a country’s ability to enforce contracts an important determinant of comparative advantage? To answer this question, I construct a variable that measures, for each good, the proportion of its intermediate inputs that require relationship-specific investments. Combining this measure with data on trade flows and judicial quality, I find that countries with good contract enforcement specialize…
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Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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