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...

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...

We develop a theory of control rights in the context of licencing interim innovative knowledge for further development, which is consistent with the inalienability of initial innovator's intellectual property rights. Control rights of a downstream development unit, a buyer of the interin...

Opportunistic behaviour due to incomplete contract enforcement is a risk in many economic transactions such as forest carbon sequestration contracts. In this paper, an enforcement-proof incentive contract is developed in which a buyer demands a guaranteed delivery of a good or service given a...

We view a contract as a list of outcomes. Ex ante, the parties commit not to consider outcomes not on the list, i.e., these are "ruled out". Ex post, they freely bargain over outcomes on the list, i.e., the contract specifies no mechanism to structure their choice; in this sense outcomes on the...

We argue on theoretical grounds that obligatory compliance with stricter financial reporting rules (e.g. the US Sabanes-Oxley Act) may entail important unintended consequences. Paradoxically, the amount of misreporting may increase because corporate boards spend more valuable resources...

The financial crisis has generated a deep revision of the regulation of securities and derivatives markets. In this paper, we critically examine the extent to which current reforms, such as the European Market Infrastructure Regulation and the proposed new Markets in Financial Instruments...

In the past few years the informal sector in countries in transition has increasingly become the focus of research, public policy and the media. The term ¿informal sector¿ has been used to describe an extremely wide spectrum of activities, which do not necessarily have much in common, such as...

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...