Empirical Research in Contracts:watch Your Step
Abstract: Ronald Coase offered strong motivation for scholars to engage in empirical analysis of contracts. In his famous speech at the Swedish Academy he stated that there is a large amount of information available about business contracts that are unknown to economists. The establishment of centers of studies of contracts, have been observed since then, aiming to collect contracts and prepare databases to facilitate research focused on the institutional structure of production deepening the knowledge about the functioning of the real economic system. As a result of his initiative, different research centers around the world initiated consistent collections of business contracts. The leitmotif offered by Prof. Coase has shown positive results, allowing the research on institutional structure of production to be carried on a more consistent way. The motivation for the present study is to contrast the evolution of the economy of organization theory and the profile of the data of contracts that are collected. If the goal of organization economists is to study how the real economic system works, then we should recognize that the use of data collections of contracts is insufficient and can only picture part of the incentives present in most of the institutional arrangements. The basic proposition is that if data based on contract collections is used without the necessary care, the results can lead to false conclusions
