It is often argued that additional checks and balances provide economic agents with better protection from expropriation of their wealth or productive capital. We demonstrate that in a dynamic political economy model this intuition may be flawed. Surprisingly, increasing the number of veto...

This paper introduces endogenous property rights into a neoclassical growth model. 1t identifies a mechanism that generates growth rates which are increasing at low levels of capital. and decreasing at high levels of capital. The driving force behind changes in property rights is the attempt of...

Courts have articulated a number of legal tests to distinguish corporate transactions that have a legitimate business or economic purpose from those carried out largely, if not solely, for favorable tax treatment. We outline an approach to analyzing the economic substance of corporate...

We study the economics of employment relationships through theoretical and empirical analysis of an unusual set of firms, large law firms. Our point of departure is the quot;property rightsquot; approach that emphasizes the centrality of ownership's legal rights to control important, non-human...

Extending recent results in the industrial organization literature (Carvajal et al. 2013), we de-rive non-parametric tests of behavior consistent with the tragedy of the commons model. Our approach derives testable implications of such behavior under any arbitrarily concave, differentiable...

Property rights are the most fundamental institution in any society. They determine who has decision-making authority over assets and who bears the costs and benefits of those decisions. They assign ownership, wealth, political influence, and social standing. They make markets possible; define...

When parties can bargain with each other in an externality situation, it is frequently argued that liability rules are preferable to property rules. The case for liability rules is thought to be strongest when the parties behave strategically, when the collective authority responsible for...

A central challenge in securing property rights is the subversion of justice through legal skill, bribery, or physical force by the strong—the state or its powerful citizens—against the weak. We present evidence that undue influence on courts is a common concern in many countries, especially...

We study the innovation and diffusion of technology at the industry level. We derive the full dynamic paths of an industry's evolution, from birth to its maturity, and we characterize the impact of diffusion on the incentive to innovate. The model implies that protection of innovators should be...

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...