Schmidtchen, Dieter; Mayer, Achim - In: Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics (JITE) 153 (1997) 1, pp. 122-122
The medieval Church is viewed as a franchise system. The paper analyzes the licensing of the friars as an institutional innovation which the popes of the 13th century initiated in order to appropriate the rents made possible both by the systematic development of the concept of purgatory and the...