The composer has historically been at the top of the tree in the music industry; most royalties due to artists flow back to composers/songwriters rather than performers. Over the last few decades, the enactment of stronger performers’ rights has sought to redress this historical imbalance by...

This paper studies the design of law-making and law enforcement institutions based on the premise that law is inherently incomplete. Under incomplete law, law enforcement by courts may suffer from deterrence failure, defined as the socialwelfare loss that results from the regime's inability to...

The dominant explanatory/justificatory framework informing scholarly commentary on copyright law, policy and theory today – certainly in the US – is law and economics. From this perspective, copyright law exists to underpin markets in certain categories of ‘information good’ (copyright...

The 2004 Presidential Election in Mozambique was marred by allegations of fraud. We assess the validity of these allegations by testing whether or not qualitative descriptions of the methods and locations of misconduct are consistent with a series of simple quantitative tests. Most studies of...

We investigate the causal relationship between judicial efficiency and firm size across Italian municipalities, exploiting spatial discontinuities in tribunals' jurisdiction for identification. Results show that halving the length of civil proceedings, average firm size would increase by around...

his paper analyses the work of the Nobel Prize winning economist Professor Amartya Sen from the perspective of human rights. It assesses the ways in which Sen’s research agenda has deepened and expanded human rights discourse in the disciplines of ethics and economics, and examines how his...

Fifteen per cent of British babies are now born to parents who are neither cohabiting nor married. Little is known about non-residential fatherhood that commences with the birth of a child. Here, we use the Millennium Cohort Study to examine a number of aspects of this form of fatherhood....

This paper studies how patent rights and price regulation affect how fast new drugs are launched in different countries, using newly constructed data on launches of 642 new drugs in 76 countries for the period 1983-2002, and information on the duration and content of patent and price control...

This paper investigates whether the industrial relations climate in Indian States has affected the pattern of manufacturing growth in the period 1958-92. We show that pro-worker amendments to the Industrial Disputes Act are associated with lowered investment, employment, productivity and output...

This paper is intended to make a contribution to the empirical literature explaining the rise of unemployment since the 1970s in western economies by means of interactions between shocks and institutions. The contribution is twofold. First, the impact of a general feature of developed economies...