The creation mandate is a call for humankind to be responsible stewards of the resources God entrusts to us as we endeavor to meet the needs of each human being and to live in shalom. The earth is endowed with finite resources, but humanity has unlimited wants, which means that trade-offs must...

Biographical note: Carsten Herrmann-Pillath is Professor and Permanent Fellow at the Max Weber Centre for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies, University of Erfurt and a principal researcher at the COEVOLVERS project.

This paper investigates the formation of production and trading networks in economies with general interdependencies and complex property rights. We argue that the right to exclude, a core tenet of property, grants asset owners local monopoly power that is amplified by an economy's endogenous...

The present work is a collection of essays. The first one is new, written for the collection. Then follows 7 separate essays of varying age. They are named * On the classifications of property rights * A property rights perspective on institutional change in the welfare state * On the nature of...

In the past decade, the legal and economic literature on blockchain technology and its applications has flourished. This new technology holds great promise for enhancing the efficiency of contracting. Building on the classic Coase theorem, blockchain as a decentralised mechanism of...

There is a broad agreement that political and economic institutions matter for long-term development. Yet relatively little is known as to how to adopt good quality institutions and reform weak or poor institutions, for which one needs to know how institutions change. This paper provides a...

Intellectual property law is not prepared for a world where non-humans create significant inventions, music, literature, and art. Generative artificial intelligence’s ability to produce valuable properties without attributable authorship defies the theories of ownership that underlie modern...

We conduct an empirical study to examine the impact of the initial distribution of labor-related property rights on the allocative efficiency of labor markets for skilled workers in a highly competitive labor market (professional basketball). Specifically, we compare a regime where employers can...

The voluminous strategy research on the determinants of corporate scope is often premised on a well-established property rights regime, which contrasts with the weak property rights protection that still characterizes most countries today. We address this gap by applying property rights theory...

Incomplete property rights are common across a range of natural resources such as fisheries and groundwater. The High Plains Aquifer region of Kansas provides one example of a complex but incomplete system of property rights. Rights to groundwater in Kansas are incomplete due to the physical...

This paper examines the dynamic connections between local wealth inequality and the local politics of property rights within a federal system. We model a jurisdiction comprising a politically dominant in-group and a marginalized out-group. At each date, the jurisdiction tries to redistribute...

This Article seizes on a specific doctrinal discussion in Eric Claeys’s Natural Property Rights to argue for the importance of understanding property doctrines in the context of a system of interconnecting rules and standards and not in isolation. The ad coelum doctrine provides that land...

In the property rights approach to the theory of the firm, ownership matters if parties have to make partly relationship-specific investments, but ownership would be irrelevant if the investments were completely relationship-specific. We show that if negotiations after the investment stage...

This article considers if it is possible to legislate for rent control and rent freezes in Ireland in light of the strong protections for private property set out in the 1937 Constitution. The main cases are analysed and some guidance offered as to the features of a statutory scheme that would...

We present new evidence on how generalized trust is formed. Unlike previous studies, we look at the explanatory power of economic institutions, we use newer data, we incorporate more countries, and we use instrumental variables in an attempt to handle the causality problem. A central result is...

We conduct an empirical study to examine the impact of the initial distribution of labor-related property rights on the allocative efficiency of labor markets for skilled workers in a highly competitive labor market (professional basketball). Specifically, we compare a regime where employers can...

With the advance of smart IoT devices (Internet of Things) the amount of valuable data will increase dramatically. For much of the thus generated non-personal data no legal rights exist. In its Data Act (DA) draft the EU Commission proposes new data access and sharing rights for the users of IoT...

It is generally stated that the fractional-reserve banking system (FRBS) is consistent with sustainable economic growth and development. While it assumes that depositors will not be a joint demand who will claim all their money simultaneously, it supposes that a monetary aggregate greater than...

Natural resources such as carbon, water, and fish are increasingly managed with markets that require an initial allocation of property rights. In practice these rights are typically grandfathered based on historical use, but rights could be allocated any number of ways. Taking the perspective of...

How should we allocate property rights in unowned tangible and intangible resources? This Article develops a model of original acquisition that draws together common law doctrines of first possession with original acquisition doctrines in patent, copyright, and trademark law. The common...

The conception of property that a transitional state adopts is critically important because it affects the state’s ability to transform society. The classic conception of property gives property rights a certain sanctity that allows owners to have near absolute control of their property. But,...

Under the context of a dynamic oligopoly model of entry and exit with two firms, we analytically derive a set of sufficient conditions for deterrence-motivated entry. In particular, the conceptual framework we present yields a set of testable hypotheses that can be conducted using inferred...

The numerus clausus principle, which limits both the number and content of property rights, has been explained by law and economics scholars as a device for reducing information costs. From this perspective, a more complex system of property rights can only be achieved at the price of less legal...

This article argues that a liberal theory of property rights can help us resolve a century old debate about a foundational aspect of the trust, namely, the nature of the beneficiary’s interest. According to orthodoxy, the beneficiary has a (weak form) of proprietary right to the trust res. But...