We explain why European trucking carriers are much smaller and rely more heavily on owner-operators (as opposed to employee drivers) than their US counterparts. Our analysis begins by ruling out differences in technology as the source of those disparities and confirms that standard hypotheses in...

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...

That individuals contribute in social dilemma interactions even when contributing is costly is a well-established observation in the experimental literature. Since a contributor is always strictly worse off than a non-contributor the question is raised if an intrinsic motivation to contribute...

This Article 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 other types of public financing schemes, we suggest extending institutional...

Previous analysis has shown that traders may opt for specific technologies with no joint productivity advantage as a way to commit themselves to trading jointly, but only when long-term contracting is infeasible. This paper proves that speciÞcity can also be optimal (by relaxing the...

We study the effect of organizational choice and institutions on the performance of Spanish car dealerships. Using outlet-level data from 1994, we find that verticallyintegrated dealerships showed substantially lower labor productivity, higher labor costs and lower profitability than franchised...

We study how barriers to business start-up affect the investment in knowledge capital when contracts are not enforceable. Barriers to business start-up lower the competition for knowledge capital and, in absence of commitment, reduce the incentive to accumulate knowledge. As a result, countries...

We develop a setting with weak intellectual property rights, where firms' boundaries, location and knowledge spillovers are endogenous. We have two main results. The first one is that, if communication costs increase with distance, entrepreneurs concerned about information leakage have a benefit...