We explore the nature of Business Groups, that is network-like forms of hierarchical organization between legally autonomous firms spanning both within and across national borders. Exploiting a unique dataset of 270,474 headquarters controlling more than 1,500,000 (domestic and foreign)...

The economic literature of property rights has been assessing the impact of different community based arrangements on the efficiency of natural resource management of specific areas. Differently, other strands of development economics and policy-oriented research have been concerned with issues...

The paper focuses in the calculation of the oil capital value in a small open economy depending on oil rents. The Venezuelan case is used as an example. In valuing the oil capital, two issues are recalled and discussed: how should the exploration costs and the capital gains be treated? It is...

There are more and more industries in which firms are specialized in the production of a component of the final good. This is especially true in high-tech industries. The basic question is why don't these firms merge ? We paradoxically show that industries which are typical candidates for...

This paper investigates institutions for the creation and transmission of knowledge as efficient resource allocation mechanisms. By looking at Science and Technology it develops a two way classification. Science, is a non market allocation mechanism, where knowledge is treated as a pure public...

Economic theory has generally akcnowledged the role that institutions have in shaping economic space. The distinction however between physical and institutional descriptions of economic activity has not received adequate attention within the mainstream paradigm. In this paper I show how a proper...

The process of assigning property rights to land in the American Great Plains resulted in farms that were too small to be economically viable. These farms were prime contributors to the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. The path dependence resulting from the initial assignment of property rights on the...

This paper revisits the tragedy of the commons when agents have different capabilities in both production and encroachment activities, and can allocate their time between them. Under fairly general assumptions on production and encroachment technologies, an individual's expected income is convex...

Why has the expansion of women's economic and political rights coincided with economic development? This paper investigates this question, focusing on a key economic right for women: property rights. The basic hypothesis is that the process of development (i.e., capital accumulation and...