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

This paper explores the consequences of creating and improving property rights so that fixed assets can be used as collateral. This has become a cause célèbre of Hernando de Soto whose views are influential in debates about policy reform concerning property rights. Hence, we refer to the...

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...

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...

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,...

We study the impact of import protection on relationship-specific investments, organizational choice and welfare. We show that a tariff on intermediate inputs can improve social welfare through mitigating hold-up problems. It does so if it discriminates in favor of the investing party, thereby...

We identify the inefficiencies that arise when negotiation between two parties takes place in the presence of transaction costs. First, for some values of these costs it is efficient to reach an agreement but the unique equilibrium outcome is one in which agreement is never reached. Secondly,...

Does the distribution of land rights affect the choice of contractible techniques? I present evidence suggesting that Nicaraguan farmers are more likely to grow effort-intensive crops on owned rather than on rented plots. I consider two theoretical arguments that illustrate why property rights...

This paper centres around the question of ownership of firms and managerial competition and how these affect managers and employees’ incentives to invest in human capital. We argue that employees’ incentives in human capital investment are affected by both ownership and competition since...

This paper presents a case study of credit transactions in Palanpur, a north Indian village. Drawing on detailed informtion from all borrowers and lenders in the village, we examine a number of issues related to the functioning of rural credit markets. These include the segmentation of the...