Weak property rights over land prevent efficient allocation of production factors in the developing world. Farmers who lack title secure access to the land they work by providing evidence of productive use. The ``use it or lose it'' principle leads to a thin land rental market and a...

I test the land and labor market effects of a property rights reform that computerized rural land records in Pakistan, making digitized records and automated transactions accessible to agricultural landowners and cultivators. Using the staggered roll-out of the program, I find that while the...

Like many professional sports leagues worldwide, the National Basketball Association is organized as a cooperative of team owners. We argue that league ownership structures must balance two types of transaction costs: the costs of contracting with stakeholders of the league, importantly players,...

This study extends the literature on fighting software piracy by investigating how Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs) regimes interact with technology to mitigate software piracy when existing levels of piracy are considered. Two technology metrics (internet penetration rate and number of PC...

This short essay is my contribution to the third issue of the Revue Européenne du Droit, which will be dedicated to the possible, desirable or misguided, transformation of some fundamental aspects of the functioning of the market economy. It heavily draws on "A Liberal Theory of Property"

This part deals with the basic elements of property law. I begin in chapter 7 by examining the fundamental question of what justifies the social institution of property, that is, the rationale for the rights that constitute what we commonly call ownership. I also discuss examples of the...

Common Property Resources are also a type of Natural Resources that are under the possession of any particular individual, rather such resources are possessed by a group of individuals or a a community as a whole. Since the origin of the concept of CPRs there have been several debates over the...

Since the transition to agricultural production, property rights to land have been a key institution for economic development. Clearly defined land rights provide economic agents with increased access to credit, secure returns on investment, free up resources used to defend one's land rights,...

Copyrights and patents are differently-structured intellectual property rights in different kinds of entities. Nonetheless, they are widely regarded by U.S. scholars as having the same theoretical underpinnings. Though scholars have sought to connect philosophical theories of property to...

To study the applicability of the Porter hypothesis to Chinese manufacturing enterprises from a property rights perspective, we match the financial data of all A-share manufacturing companies listed in Shanghai and Shenzhen Stock Exchanges of China from 2008 to 2016 with the marketization index...

This article invokes a concept of ‘community-based individual property rights’ as individual property rights recognized in a communal property system by virtue of community membership. It employs mixed methods, including a comparative analysis that reviews and develops the ‘bundle of...

The arguments that property rights and taxation positively affect development are well established in separate literatures, but the link between property rights and taxation is understudied. To address this gap, we theorize that formalization of individual property rights facilitates economic...

The Austrian school economics and neo-Marxist theories both have been reviving in recent years. However, the current academic discussion lacks a debate between two schools of economics with diametrically opposed views. This paper is the first and an initial Austrian challenge to Neo-Marxist...

This study examines the effects of the historical prevalence of infectious diseases on contemporary entrepreneurship. Previous studies reveal the persistence of the effects of historical diseases on innovation, through the channel of culture. Drawing on the epidemiological origin of...

We study how distributional preferences are affected by a major property rights reform that transformed informal use-rights over land traditionally characterizing rural Beninese villages in a system akin to private ownership. The design combines the randomized control-trial implementation of the...

Owing to climate change, population growth and tenurial changes, the past decade has witnessed high interest among migrant and settler pastoralist groups in the vegetal-rich customary lands of the Agogo Traditional Area. This has resulted in lease grants of large land areas to pastoralists by...

This paper tests the independence property under the Coase Theorem in a large multinational cap-and-trade scheme for greenhouse gas emissions, the EU Emissions Trading System (EU ETS). I analyze whether emissions of power producers regulated under the EU ETS are independent from allowance...

Most of the world’s natural resources can be found on the territories of indigenous peoples. This puts indigenous peoples in a position where they are not only subjected to environmental hazards as a result of the mining and exploitation of these resources, but are also denied the use and...

States have routinely changed the form and the transmission mechanisms of money, from the ancient practice of coin de-basement, to the introduction of the Euro in 1999, or the recent push towards cashless payments. Very little has been said on the impact that monetary transitions have on money...

In this paper, we develop a simple model of international outsourcing and apply it to processing trade in China. We observe China's processing exports broken down by who owns the plant and by who controls the inputs the plant processes. Multinational firms engaged in export processing in China...

Property rights hold a central place in our Constitutional design and provide the foundation for America's market economy. Admiration of private property has not been universal, however. Some environmental scholars and policymakers have been particularly critical of classical liberal conceptions...

While focusing on residual control rights, the property rights theory of the firm overlooks that the legal protection of each party's input shapes its ex post bargaining power. By assuming that the property rights on the inputs are selected by a---possibly---benevolent legislator to maximize...

This chapter discusses intangible property and non-proprietary intangibles. It begins with a discussion of the idea of the right against interference as the basic right of property and compares it with idea of the right to the benefit of property. It discusses the idea of remedial consistency -...

The main thesis of this article is that individuals should own their user-held data. Rapidly developing data processing technologies empowers individuals to collect their data from different sources and retain it in personal data clouds. Such user-held data represents the most accurate,...

As Hodgson has nicely pointed out, capitalism can be only understood if we accept that, unlike possession, property is a social construction and a relation among individuals. Unlike possession, property does not require a material thing on which it should be applied. Property rights can create...

Private ownership should generally be preferred to public ownership when the incentives to innovate and to contain costs must be strong. In essence, this is the case for capitalism over socialism, explaining the dynamic vitality' of free enterprise. The great economists of the 1930s and 1940s...

Property enhances autonomy for most people, but not for all. Because it both empowers and disables, property requires constant vigilance. “A Liberal Theory of Property” addresses key questions: how can property be justified? What core values should property law advance, and how do those...

This paper tests the independence property under the Coase Theorem in a large multinational cap-and-trade scheme for greenhouse gas emissions, the EU Emissions Trading System (EU ETS). I analyze whether emissions of power producers regulated under the EU ETS are independent from allowance...

The most significant innovation in recent years has been blockchain technology. Such innovations demand a response from the law. The most significant innovation of the last twenty-five years has been the internet. The relative lack of government regulation in the domain of public law has been...

Formal private property rights (“FPPRs”) have been advocated as an important prerequisite to economic development: a legal right to property ownership motivates economic players to engage in economic activities when these activities yield property interests, and this, in turn, contributes to...

The debate over whether political democracy is the least bad regime, as Churchill once said, remains unresolved because history has been ignored or misread, and because recent statistical studies have not chosen the right tests. Using too little historical information, and mistaking formal...

Are behavioral nudges consonant with the free society? Rizzo and Whitman argue that, with few exceptions, behavioral interventions aimed at addressing self-harms are unjustified and deleterious to freedom. At the core of their critique is a rejection of a narrow neoclassical account of...

This paper provides new empirical results regarding the demand and supply of title, its impact on land value, and its effects on agricultural investment on Brazilian frontiers. We use survey data from 1992 and 1993 from the state of Par with data on the characteristics of the settlers, land...

In India, for ages Hindu women faced discrimination within the families w.r.t their property rights. Before independence women’s property was divided into 2 heads, stridhan & woman’s estate. Some restrictions were there on her power of disposal, if she was a married woman. The old law of...

This paper identifies political property rights and jurisdictional rivalry as the fundamental dimensions to understand comparative economic and political development. After developing a general framework for the study of relative performance in the ‘market for governance', we argue that...

In cities across the country, artists, protesters, and businesses are using light projections to turn any building's facade into a billboard without the owner's consent. Examples are legion: “Believe Women” on a New York City Best Buy; a scantily clad male model on the side of an apartment...

Knowledge about property rights is a commons that facilitates market exchange and economic coordination. The governance of that shared knowledge resource—the various formal and informal rules that maintain ledgers of property rights—ranges from community norms to formal state registries. In...

Patents are increasingly swept up into the operations of agencies in the modern administrative state. This has raised anew the fundamental question whether patents are private property rights or special privileges, because this determines how constitutional guarantees apply to patents in...