Many public-health researchers are quick to raise charges of bias to explain away the few studies that reach politically incorrect conclusions. Claims of bias are often thrown at researchers who are funded by the industries targeted for aggressive intervention. This paper discusses whether it...

We review the claim that the field of political economy has witnessed a quantum leap with Torsten Persson and Guido Tabellini´s The Economic Effects of Constitutions. We find that the approach of Persson and Tabellini suffers from the neglect of previous research, notably in public choice...

Jakob De Haan, Susanna Lundström, and Jan-Egbert Sturm have written a valuable survey of the literature that uses the Gwartney and Lawson economic freedom (EFW) index. Their discussion of the index’s theoretical underpinnings and methodological ins and outs itself should be useful to scholars...

In this paper, I examine three different models of how we manage our common resources through a system of private property rights. One model (the exclusion approach) is to control owners' decisions indirectly, through markets. Another model (the bundle-of-rights approach) is to regulate owners'...

Many modern writers have criticized the notion that property consists of a bundle of rights in some determinate thing as a weak conception that invites increased government control over private property, especially real estate. This article rejects that conception for the following reasons....

The phrase "bundle of rights" does not serve as an accurate conceptual definition of property. Nor has that phrase provided a helpful metaphor as used in Ronald Coase's article "The Problem of Social Cost" (1960) and subsequent legal and economic scholarship. Coase's usage portrays property...

For nearly a century, most persons who have studied or written about property have conceived of it as a bundle of rights or, colloquially, as a bundle of sticks. In the mid 1990s, several philosophically minded academic lawyers questioned whether property should be thought of as a bundle at all....

This essay contrasts the bundle-of-rights picture of property unfavorably with an architectural or modular approach. The bundle is a legacy of Legal Realism and wrongly obscures the costs of delineating property. The bundle treats property as too unstructured, its constituent rights as too...

This essay explores an emerging issue in the criticism of the "bundle" conception of property: whether embracing the right to exclude as the core of property is sufficiently determinate to avoid the same disintegrating effects as the bundle conception. Thomas Merrill and Henry Smith believe so,...

Viewing property rights as a "bundle of sticks" can be descriptively clarifying because the law commonly entitles an owner of a particular resource to split up entitlements in it. Nonetheless, Thomas Merrill and Henry Smith, the most prominent critics of the metaphor, assert that this conception...