We study how inefficiencies of market failure may be further amplified by political choices made by interest groups created in the inefficient market. We take an occupational choice framework, where agents are endowed heterogeneously with wealth and talent. In our model, market failure due to...

This chapter develops a unified analytical framework, drawing on and extending theexisting literature on the subject, for studying the role of property rights in economicdevelopment. It addresses two fundamental and related questions concerning therelationship between property rights and...

This paper studies the effect of ownership structure on workers' incentives for investing in firm-specific human capital. Particularly, we analyse such incentivers and monitoring under employee ownership and capitalist ownership. In our model, the employee-owned firm is a firm bought by its...

The standard property-rights theory of the firm assumes that prior to investing in human capital, team members meet and negotiate asset ownership. This paper endogenizes the event sequence in a matching model of market equilibrium. Equilibria exist in which, for strategic and efficiency reasons,...

In this article I argue that, in contrast to what is implicitly assumed in many popular writings on food security in the future, the interface that connects the problems of population growth, poverty, environmental degradation, food insecurity, and civic disconnection should ideally be studied...

This article examines the links that have recently been studied between poverty, high fertility and undernourishment, on the one hand, and degradation of the local environmental-resource base and civic disconnection, on the other, in poor countries. An account is offered of a number of pathways...

Although property rights are the cornerstone of capitalist economics, throughout history existing claims have been frequently overturned and redefined by revolution. A fundamental question for economists is what makes revolutions more likely to occur. A large literature has found contradictory...

This paper develops a simple model to show how social insurance affects the desire to revolt against property rights. It then tests for the effect of social insurance on revolt by introducing a panel data set derived from surveys across 200,000 randomly sampled individuals from the 1970s to the...