"How does the lack of legitimacy of property rights affect the dynamics of the creation of the rule of law? We investigate the demand for the rule of law in post-Communist economies after privatization under the assumption that theft is possible, that those who have "stolen" assets cannot be...

A central requirement in the design of a legal system is the protection of law enforcers from coercion by litigants through either violence or bribes. The higher the risk of coercion, the greater the need for protection and control of law enforcers by the state. This perspective explains why, in...

Traditionally, general-equilibrium models have taken effective property rights to be given and have been concerned only with analysing the allocation of resources among productive uses and the distribution of the resulting product. But, this formulation of the economic problem is incomplete...

This paper explores a series of general-equilibrium models in which people can choose to be either producers or predators, and in which producers can allocate their resources either to production or to guarding their production against predators. The analysis shows how the ratio of predators to...

Private ownership should generally be preferred to public ownership when the incentives to innovate and to contain costs must be strong. In essence, this is the case for capitalism over socialism, explaining the dynamic vitality' of free enterprise. The great economists of the 1930s and 1940s...

This paper investigates the characteristics of litigated patents by combining for the first" time information about patent case filings from the U.S. district courts and detailed data from the" U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. We construct a series of indicators for the factors which the"...

This paper provides new empirical results regarding the demand and supply of title, its impact on land value, and its effects on agricultural investment on Brazilian frontiers. We use survey data from 1992 and 1993 from the state of Par with data on the characteristics of the settlers, land...

There is an inherent tension between the idea that individuals have certain inalienable (natural) rights and the economist's postulate that the rate if utilization of anything whose production requires scarce resources must be limited by considerations of opportunity cost. Remarks about rights...

Data is nonrival: a person's location history, medical records, and driving data can be used by any number of firms simultaneously. Nonrivalry leads to increasing returns and implies an important role for market structure and property rights. Who should own data? What restrictions should apply...

How do the different elements in the standard bundle of property rights - such as the right of possession or the right of transfer - differentially impact outcomes, such as urban development? This paper incorporates insecure property rights into a standard model of urban land prices and density,...