Harold Demsetz (1967. “Towards a Theory of Property Rights,” The American Economic Review 57(2): 350), in a seminal paper, developed an economic thesis of the emergence of private property: “[P]roperty rights develop to internalize externalities when the gains of internalization become...

“The Economic System of China” by Steven Cheung was originally presented as the lead paper at the 2008 Chicago Conference on China’s Market Transformation, organized by Professor Coase. While the paper, with a Chinese translation, has been available in China since 2009, it has not received...