In many settings, human beings are boundedly rational. A distinctive and insufficiently explored legal response to bounded rationality is to attempt to "debias through law," by steering people in more rational directions. In many important domains, existing legal analyses emphasize the...

This paper examines the origins and economic effects of the two dominant land demarcation systems: metes and bounds (MB) and the rectangular system (RS). Under MB property is demarcated by its perimeter as indicated by natural features and human structures and linked to surveys within local...

Urbanisation in China has long been held back by various restrictions on land and internal migration but has taken off since the 1990s, as these impediments started to be gradually relaxed. People have moved in large numbers to richer cities, where productivity is higher and has increased...

We investigate whether patents that are jointly held by legally independent companies help sustain product-market collusion. We use a simple model of repeated interactions to show that joint patents can serve collusive purposes. Our model generates two testable predictions: when joint patents...

Investment treaty law – which is scattered over 3 000 international investment agreements adopted over a period of 50 years – is a crucial but complex basis for regulating international investment flows. Investment treaties are often thought to be silent on investors’ responsibilities to...

Federal estate taxes give very wealthy families incentives to transfer resources directly to distant generations in order to avoid taxes on successive rounds of transfers. Until recently such transfers were impeded by the rule against perpetuities, which prevented transfers to most potential...

This paper adapts the theory of efficiency wages to explain the natural vacancy rate in rental housing markets. A positive vacancy rate provides landlords an incentive to invest in maintenance because if they fail to do so, some tenants will leave and the unit will sit vacant for a finite period...

The main contribution of Coase1 is having proven that no institution is a free lunch (among others, Pagano, 2012). It means that every institution (e.g. the market and the firm) has non-null costs of functioning, i.e. transaction costs. In a world with positive transaction costs, the...

There are three separate strands of literature in economics that are related to the efficiency of takings under eminent domain: one addresses the question of optimal compensation for properties that are taken, the second inquires how governments might learn the values of properties that they...

Our analysis focuses on a situation where a landowner and the government invest prior to the government's taking decision. When the government suffers from budgetary fiscal illusion, optimal compensation equals the hypothetical value of the landowner's property had she invested efficiently. In...