This paper examines the microeconomic determinants of residential real estate prices in Caracas, Venezuela, using a private database containing 17,526 transactions from 2008 to 2009. The particular institutional characteristics of many countries in Latin America, and Venezuela in particular,...

Is it justified for states to appropriate private property rights? If so, should governments regulate or expropriate? Competing models predict that government power of appropriation causes underinvestment, overinvestment, and growth. We use random assignment of U.S. federal court judges setting...

A number of developing countries use land expropriation policies to expand cities and develop peri-urban areas. In China, an average of 1,600 km2 were expropriated annually from 2004-2018. The impact of this urban development strategy on expropriated households is not well-understood. I estimate...

We identify the causal effect of career incentives on bureaucrat performance by exploiting the ex ante competitiveness of promotions. Using detailed data on the career histories of top bureaucrats in all Chinese prefectures between 1996 and 2014, we show that bureaucrats with fewer competitors...

Is it justified for states to appropriate private property rights? If so, should governments regulate or expropriate? Competing models predict that government power of appropriation causes underinvestment, overinvestment, and growth. We use random assignment of U.S. federal court judges setting...

The presence of institutional investors in a firm's ownership structure is often associated with improved corporate governance practices and increased focus on long-term sustainable value creation. This study investigates whether the presence of institutional investors and a strong CSR...

This paper uses the enactment of China’s 2007 Property Law (the Law), which reduces the risk of expropriation by local governments, as the setting to investigate the importance of property rights protection for private firm investment. Using propensity score matching and a...

Rights offers are a relatively common capital-raising method. In a rights offer, the company’s existing shareholders are given the opportunity to purchase newly-issued shares in proportion to the amount of shares they already own for a specific subscription price per-share. Because all...

We investigate a 2012 pay-or-explain regulation implemented by China's Shanghai Stock Exchange. The regulation mandates that eligible firms must either pay 30% of their current-year profits as cash dividends or explain the reasons for their nonpayment through a public conference call. Using...

In this essay, I analyze the nationalization of large copper mines during Salvador Allende's socialist government in Chile in the 1970s. This is one of the earliest cases "nationalization without compensation." Chile's legal argument was based on the novel idea that "adequate" payment should be...

Auslandsinvestitionen unterliegen heutzutage vielfach dem Schutz eines internationalen Investitionsschutzabkommens. Der in diesen Abkommen regelmäßig verankerte Schutz von Investitionen vor entschädigungsloser Enteignung kann mit staatlichen Maßnahmen zum Zwecke des Klimaschutzes in Konflikt...

The Australian Domestic Gas Security Mechanism (‘ADGSM’) provides the Australian Government with an expedient regulatory tool over gas exporters. Australia is the largest exporter of Liquified Natural Gas (‘LNG’) in the world but has suffered from very high domestic gas prices. If the...

This paper examines the effectiveness of six institutional quality measures, namely corruption control, effective government, political stability, regulatory quality, rule of law and voice and accountability, in inhibiting self-rewarding behaviour of boards in terms of their compensation as well...

We use a dataset of the entire population of English Parliamentary enclosure acts between 1750 and 1830 to provide the first causal evidence of their impact. Exploiting a feature of the Parliamentary process that produced such legislation as a source of exogenous variation, we show that...

Of the many powers granted to federal, state, and local governments through the Constitution of the United States, eminent domain is possibly the strongest and most imposing, at least as it relates to citizens’ property rights. This dissertation explores several large-scale public undertakings...

We use a dataset of the entire population of English Parliamentary enclosure acts between 1750 and 1830 to provide the first causal evidence of their impact. Exploiting a feature of the Parliamentary process that produced such legislation as a source of exogenous variation, we show that...

The sinister turn in international law can be defined as the paradox created by successful decolonization efforts when 1) the colonization and decolonization are/were characterized by race, such as in the case of former apartheid states, 2) decolonization reverses the political and legal...

We examine the optimal financing of infrastructure when governments have limited financial commitment and can expropriate rents from private sector firms that manage infrastructure. While private firms need incentives to implement projects well, governments need incentives to limit...

We show that armed actors refrain from using their power to arbitrarily steal from an economy if, and only if, the armed actors' property rights over stealing from that economy are secure. By 2009, armed actors taxed, administered, and protected various villages in Democratic Republic of the...

Der folgende Beitrag zeichnet die Anfänge der Behandlung des Bodens in der Geschichte der ökonomischen Theorie und in der dazu korrespondierenden politischen Praxis nach. Eine zentrale Rolle spielt die Kritik am Privatbesitz am Boden, aus der dann die Forderung nach einer Besteuerung des...

We ask whether eminent domain can deliver net benefits to households and how affected citizens politically interact with the government. Our context is house seizure and demolition in urban China during 2010-2018, a period in which market value-based compensation is offered for seized houses....

Auslandsinvestitionen unterliegen heutzutage vielfach dem Schutz eines internationalen Investitionsschutzabkommens. Der in diesen Abkommen regelmäßig verankerte Schutz von Investitionen vor entschädigungsloser Enteignung kann mit staatlichen Maßnahmen zum Zwecke des Klimaschutzes in Konflikt...

We analyze how expropriation risk reduces incentives for innovation and reallocates resources from the innovative sector, building on Romer's(1990) model. Our framework predicts the R&D expenditure, the share of human capital in R&D, the number of patents, technical progress, and economic growth...

"Placing himself at the crossroads of economics, law, and sociology, Christian Bessy investigates the contemporary transformation of intellectual property rights (IPR). He demonstrates how entities previously considered inappropriate have now become the object of property rights by means of a...

Times of emergency call for drastic measures. These steps may include the physical takeover of privately-owned assets by the government for a certain period of time and for various purposes, aimed at addressing the state of emergency. When will such acts amount to a taking, and what compensation...

Which of the three legal doctrines of public use, just compensation, and due process is the most effective in constraining abuses of eminent domain power? This paper addresses this question for the first time and presents the first-ever systematic investigation of the judicial review of eminent...

This paper develops a theory of capital movements in the presence of potential expropriation. The threat of expropriation is derived from utility maximizing behavior by host countries. Potential investors, anticipating this behavior, modify their investment plans to avoid expropriation. When-...

This Comment provides an argument for applying a wellbeing-analysis approach to eminent domain compensation, discussing the inefficiencies that result from compensating individuals with only the fair market value of their properties and arguing that a well-being-analysis approach provides a way...

We show that armed actors refrain from using their power to arbitrarily steal from an economy if, and only if, the armed actors’ property rights over stealing from that economy are secure. By 2009, armed actors taxed, administered, and protected various villages in Democratic Republic of the...

I study the political consequences of state expropriation of agricultural land in rural China by using national individual-level panel data for the period 2010-2018. Comparing outcomes before and after expropriation with changes among individuals not experiencing expropriation, I find that...

Fraus legis – defrauding or evading the application of law – is a phenomenon well-known to students of private law, but its application in public law, including constitutional law, remains largely unconsidered. To consider whether a transaction, or, it is submitted, an enactment, is an...

We examine how the market values operating assets in the presence of time-varying ex ante risk that these assets may be tunneled away. We analyze pairs of Chinese publicly listed firms and their non-listed parents and examine the market valuation of current assets (cash balances, trade...

According to classic corporate governance theory, strengthening large shareholders' cash flow rights without changing their control rights should reduce expropriation incentives by better aligning their interests with those of minority shareholders. However, due to the weaker investor...

We show that armed actors refrain from using their power to arbitrarily steal from an economy if, and only if, the armed actors' property rights over stealing from that economy are secure. By 2009, armed actors taxed, administered, and protected various villages in Democratic Republic of the...