Measuring institutional quality in ancient Athens

DEMOCRACY AND POLITICAL KNOWLEDGE IN ANCIENT ATHENS Ilya

Comparing democracies . A spatial method with application to ancient Athens

A graphic method for specifying historians’ judgments about political change, with special reference to the distance and the direction that Athenian democracy had moved from the era of Cleisthenes to that of Lycurgus. For Vincent Azoulay and Paulin Ismard (eds.). Cleisthène et Lycurgue d’Athènes: Autour du politique dans la cité classique. Editions du Sorbonne, Paris. © Josiah Ober. jober@stanf...

Learning from Ancient Athens: Demarchy and Corporate Governance

The corporate governance literature increasingly recognizes that firms can benefit from protecting and thereby inducing firm-specific investments of various stakeholders. Such investments by shareholders, employees, suppliers, customers, and the local community strengthen the sustainable competitive advantage of the firm. However, the protection of multiple stakeholders’ interests poses substan...

Quality of institutional life

During the past three or four decades, concern over the quality of life of old people living in a variety of nondomestic settings has been a key feature of research in social gerontology. Indeed any discussion of the definition of quality of life as it relates to successful aging finds that much of the literature is concerned with life within institutional environments rather than domestic ones...

On the Benefits and Costs of Legal Expertise: Adjudication in Ancient Athens

Legal expertise permits detailed laws to be written and enforced, but individuals with expertise may employ their special knowledge to skew decisions in privately beneficial directions. We illustrate this tradeoff in a simple model, which we use to guide our analysis of the legal system in ancient Athens. Rather than accepting the costs of expertise in return for the benefits, as do most modern...