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.

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...

In der vorliegenden Arbeit wird eine normative Analyse und Verteidigung der Erbschaftssteuer unternommen. Zunächst wird eine egalitaristische Argumentation für die Steuer entfaltet. Aufgrund ihrer progressiven Struktur ist die Erbschaftssteuer ein geeignetes Instrument, um der wachsenden...

The article examines the peculiarities of the exercise of freedom of contract and freedom of entrepreneurial activity by state-owned enterprises in the USSR under the conditions of the state monopoly in the production of property goods, planned regulation of production and administrative-command...

In diesem Beitrag werden im Kontext einer Kritik der politischen Ökonomie der Medien die grundsätzlichen Auswirkungen des weltweit herrschenden kapitalistischen Privateigentums an Medienunternehmen auf Medienentwicklung, Journalismus und Öffentlichkeit exemplarisch aufgezeigt....

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...

From public lands to beaches and to data, our society is rich with resources purposefully kept in the public domain. Common resources provide profound economic, social, and democratic value to individuals, communities, and society as a whole. These, however, depend on the public’s ability to...

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...

We analyze the effects of different types and concentration of ownership on performance using a population of firms in a model transition economy after mass privatization. Specifications based on first-differences and unusual instrumental variables show that contrary to conventional wisdom, the...

Following Mises’s foundational paper, ‘Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth’, first published in 1920, writers in the Austrian tradition have argued that socialism is impossible, because under socialism there would be no private property in the means of production, and...

Montero (2022) explores a discontinuity in a land reform in El Salvador and reports two main findings. First, relative to outside-owned haciendas operated by contract workers, the productivity of worker-owned cooperatives is higher for staple crops and lower for cash-crop. Second, cooperative...

Seminal theories of the firm posit that firm ownership is allocated to minimize contractual inefficiencies. Yet, it remains unclear how much the optimal ownership choice affects firm performance in practice. This paper provides a first quantification of the gains from optimal ownership within...

Germany is known for its family-owned businesses that transfer ownership across generations. However, business owners in Germany increasingly envision selling their business beyond the family, which fundamentally changes the institutionalized way private ownership of businesses is transferred....

Commonsense wisdom holds that legal protection of private property rights is essential for economic growth. China presents a “puzzle” for commonsense wisdom. Scholars agree that China achieved tremendous growth in the past 40 years―without formal property law, and more specifically,...

How should the law treat digital remains, namely, digital personal information of deceased people? Two rival conceptions compete over the best framing: property and privacy. Under property framing, digital remains are just another form of assets, subject to succession law; under privacy framing,...

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...

Diskussionen über »den« Kapitalismus, die ihm innewohnende Kraft sowie die aus ihm resultierenden Probleme sind in unserer »Gesellschaft des Spektakels« allgegenwärtig. Und obgleich sich ein nicht unerheblicher Teil der politischen Eliten, der Medienmacher, Kirchenoberhäupter oder...

"How Media Ownership Matters provides a new approach to understanding news media ownership, going beyond the typical emphasis on market concentration or media moguls to examine the influence of different forms of ownership on the production of news. The book identifies four broad ownership forms...

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...

Transitional justice is the study of those mechanisms employed by communities, states and the international community to deal with a legacy of systematic human rights abuses and authoritarianism in order to promote social reconstruction. There is a well developed transitional justice literature...

This Chapter, forthcoming in The Routledge Handbook on Property, Law and Society, the maps the intertwinement, mutual construction, and dependence of “property” and “race” with each other. The discussion examines three dimensions of property which demonstrate the socio-cultural,...

Property is more than domestic. It is international, transnational, and global. Its reach, its consequences, and its ideas can rarely be theorized effectively or contained entirely within national borders. It is produced through encounters between actors from multiple jurisdictions, and by law...

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 law of innovation balances private returns on investment against benefits to the public. Increasing intellectual property’s profitability acts as an inducement to spend money on research and testing, but threatens to increase costs to the public both directly and in terms of reduced...

We study public persuasion in elections, in which a monopoly designer or multiple competing designers attempt to influence the election outcome by manipulating public information about a payoff relevant state. We allow for a wide class of designer preferences, ranging from pursuing pure...

This Article examines property law’s effect on economic inequality, particularly centered on Thomas Piketty’s findings in Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Piketty finds that when the rate of return on capital is greater than economic growth, capital concentrates among the wealthy,...

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...