Nonmarket Institutions, Coercive Power, and Economic Efficiency

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The purpose of this research is to extend a comparative empirical and theoretical study of the nature, implications, and decline of a non-market economic institutions that supported anonymous markets for goods characterized by distance in time and place such as credit markets and contracts for future delivery. This research consists of two separate but related projects. The first is an empirical and theoretical examination of the relations between political institutions, coercive power, and commercial development during the late medieval Commercial Revolution. Specifically, these relations will be examined in the context of late medieval Genoa, the second largest maritime Italian city-state during that period. The extent to which the potential use of military power hindered the ability of feudal lords, who established the Commune of Genoa, to cooperate will be analyzed. Further, the extent to which political institutions hindered or fostered such cooperation will be examined. The second project will examine the economic implications of the ability of social groups (such as clans, tribe, and ethnic groups) to invest economic resources in military strength and use this ability to expropriate wealth from other groups. In this context, the conditions will be explored under which a state with the ability to predate and demand taxes can promote economic welfare, and the conditions under which economic welfare is not hindered due to the absence of a state with such attributes. This analysis will combine the two prevailing views of the state. Namely, the state as reflecting a social contract and the state as dictator with limited coercive power. A game theoretical framework will allow the explicit modeling of self-enforcing contractual relations. It is expected that this analysis will provide the foundation for future empirical research into the nature of the state and the economic experience of economies in pre-modern Europe and contemporary Africa.