Between 1850 and 1920, most U.S. states enacted laws expanding the rights of married women to own and control their separate property and to own their market earnings. The economic approach to property rights implies that as married women gain economic rights, the incentive to invest in girls’...

Using a model based on a trade-off between moral hazard incentives and gains from specialization, this paper explains why farming has generally not converted from small, family-based firms into large, factory-style corporate firms. Nature is both seasonal and random, and the interplay of these...

Economists have shown that first possession might cause rent dissipation from racing or overexploitation. In this study, I develop models that show how dissipation can be avoided and use the derived implications to explain the observed pattern of first possession rules in a variety of legal...

This paper examines the extent to which landowners have preemptively destroyed habitat for the endangered red-cockaded woodpeckers (RCWs) in the forests of North Carolina in order to avoid potential land-use regulations prescribed under the Endangered Species Act (ESA). Under the ESA, it is...

We examine adoption of land demarcation in the British Empire during the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries. We develop a model and test its implications against data from temperate British colonies in North America, Australia, and New Zealand. Three arrangements were implemented:...

In their empirical study of the Personal Communications Service auctions, Patrick S. Moreton and Pablo T. Spiller have shown that the bidder behavior is consistent with most economists' conceptions of competitive markets. Moreton and Spiller also presented evidence that firms competing in these...