Minority-protection laws often present variations in the level of protection over time. We show how these changes may be the result of the dynamic interaction between strong and weak social groups. We assume that interaction occurs in a democratic environment, where representative institutions...

It is one of the well-known cornerstones of corporate governance that (minority) share-holders are subject to a risk of being expropriated by the controller of the firm, i.e. either entrenched management under a dispersed ownership structure or a controlling share-holder under concentrated...

We apply the paradigm of the firm as a nexus of contracts to the debate on regulatory competition vs. unification of law as an alternative way of regulating the business corporation. This approach views the business corporation as a set of coordinated contracts among different parties. Agency...

We set up a model to study how ownership structure, corporate law and employment law interact to set the incentives that influence the decision by the large shareholder or manager effectively controlling the firm to divert resources from minority shareholders and employees. We suggest that...

It is one of the well-known cornerstones of corporate governance that (minority) share-holders are subject to a risk of being expropriated by the controller of the firm, i.e. either entrenched management under a dispersed ownership structure or a controlling share-holder under concentrated...

In this paper we present an occupational choice model for entrepreneurs, in which, based on their individual skills and on the quality of their business, entrepreneurs can keep their original business, open a new business in the same or another sector along the current business (portfolio...

This paper studies the effect of decentralization on corruption in a hierarchical organization, where decentralization is intended as the delegation of control power to lower levels in a hierarchy. Decentral- ization causes a loss in control to the higher levels, thus curbing their incentives to...

Starting from the separation between formal and real authority, the paper considers a hierarchical relation where delegation of control can be used as an incentive mechanism. It shows that delegation is optimal when parties' interests are neither too divergent nor too close. In that case...

We study the impact of piracy on the quality choices of a monopolist. In the absence of piracy, the monopolist has no incentive to differentiate its products. With piracy the monopolist might instead produce more than one quality, so that differentiation arises as the optimal strategy. This is...

An integrated monopoly, where all complements forming a composite good are offered by a single firm, is typically welfare superior to a complementary monopoly. This is the "tragedy of the anticommons". We consider the possibility of competition in the market for each complement. We present a...