The Grand Transition (GT) view claims that economic development is causal to institutional development, and that many institutional changes can be understood as transitions occurring at roughly the same level (zones) of development. The Primacy of Institutions (PoI) view claims that economic...

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...

We study the effect of the fragmentation of intellectual property rights on optimal patent design. The major finding is that when several complementary innovative components must be assembled to operate a new technology, the patentability requirements should be stronger than in the case of...

We analyse river sharing games in which a set of agents located along a river shares the available water. Using coalition theory, we find that the potential benefits of water trade may not be sufficient to make all agents in the river cooperate and acknowledge property rights as a prerequisite...

An important issue in the life sciences industries concerns the nature of the incentive mechanism that should govern the production of innovation within this R&D sector. We look at the specific problem of coordinating the supply of inputs across very different agents - North and South - that...

This paper presents theoretical and empirical evidence on the nexus between corruption and democracy. We establish a political economy model where the effect of democracy on corruption is conditional on income distribution and property rights protection. Our empirical analysis with...

Data on the growth performances of countries with similar comparative (dis)advantage and political institutions reveal a striking variation across world regions. While some former autocracies such as the East Asian growth miracles have done remarkably well, others such as the Latin American...