Adopting a simplistic view of Coase (1960), most economic analyses of property rights disregard both the key advantage that legal property rights (that is, in rem rights) provide to rightholders in terms of enhanced enforcement, and the difficulties they pose to acquirers in terms of information...

This chapter proposes two hypotheses on the publicity requirement and the limitations of possession to provide information for legal titling. It then tests these hypotheses by examining how legal systems deal with possession in movable and immovable property, and comparing actual and documentary...

I analyze the basis of the market economy in classical Rome, from the perspective of personal-versus-impersonal exchange and focusing on the role of the state in providing market-enabling institutions. I start by reviewing the central conflict in all exchanges between those holding and those...

Initiatives in electronic conveyancing and registration show the potential of new technologies to transform such systems, reducing costs and enhancing legal security. However, they also incur substantial risks of transferring costs and risks among registries, conveyancers and rightholders,...

This paper breaks new ground toward contractual and institutional innovation in models of homeownership, equity building, and mortgage enforcement. Inspired by recent developments in the affordable housing sector and in other types of public financing schemes, this paper suggests extending...

I provide a justification of intellectual property rights as a source of static efficiency gains in manufacturing, rather than dynamic benefits from greater innovation. I develop a property-rights model of a supply relationship with two dimensions of non-contractible investment. In equilibrium,...

In a model where biased judges can distort contract enforcement, we uncover positive feedback effects between the use of innovative contracts and legal evolution that improve verifiability and contracting over time. We find, however, that the cost of judicial bias also grows over time because...

We model the different ways in which precedents and contract standardization shape the development of markets and the law. In a setup where more resourceful parties can distort contract enforcement to their advantage, we find that the introduction of a standard contract reduces enforcement...

Over recent years, both governments and international aid organizations have been devoting large amounts of resources to simplifying the procedures for setting up and formalizing firms. Many of these actions have focused on reducing the initial costs of setting up the firm, disregarding the more...

In the light of first-hand data from a Beninese urban household survey in Cotonou, we investigate several motives aiming to explain participation in Rotating Savings and Credit Associations. We provide anecdotal pieces of evidence, descriptive statistics, FIML regressions and matching estimates...