Intellectual property rights are legal constraints that limit entry in industries where incumbentsare innovators. The set of legal constraints is the same for all industries, withoutconsidering that the externalities created by entry are not necessarily negative for the incumbentor that the...

This paper analyzes the incentive properties of the standard and burden of proof for a finding of negligence, when evidence about injurers' behavior is imperfect and rests with the parties. We show that the `preponderance of evidence' standard used in common law, together with ordinary exclusion...

We argue that the common-law standard of proof, given the rulesof evidence, does not minimize expected error as usually argued inthe legal literature, but may well be e±cient from the standpointof providing maximal incentives for socially desirable behavior.By contrast, civil law's higher but...

In this paper we show that the recent model by Duranton (AER, 2007) performs remarkablywell in replicating the city size distribution of West Germany, much better than the simplerank-size rule known as Zipf´s law. The main mechanism of this theoretical framework is thechurning of industries...

The paper deals with child labour in developing countries. We address a problem that hasrecently drawn much attention at the international level, that is, how to invest in women´srights to advance the rights of both women and children. We study the problem from a newperspective. In our...

Differences in geopolitical regions of Nigeria are not debatable. However, there is no clearconsensus on the dimension of these disparities. In this paper, claims of geopolitical regiondisparities in labor market outcomes are investigated using survey data from Nigeria between1996-1999...

We study the dispersion in rates of provincial economic- and TFP growth in China. Ourresults show that regional growth patterns can be understood as a function of severalinterrelated factors, which include investment in physical capital, human capital, andinfrastructure capital; the infusion of...

Der Beitrag analysiert Struktur und Entwicklung des Gründungsgeschehens in den dreideutschen Raumordnungsregionen Dresden, Rostock und Karlsruhe. Die Gründungsratender beiden ostdeutschen Regionen fallen wesentlich höher als in Karlsruhe aus.Die Betriebe der Gründungskohorten in Dresden und...

Wir analysieren die räumliche Verteilung verschiedener Kategorien kreativer Personen inDeutschland. Allgemein ist der Anteil der Kreativen in den Städten höher als auf dem Land.Ein etwas abweichendes Standortverhalten zeigen die freiberuflichen Künstler, für die auch ineinigen ländlichen...

A new approach in German innovation policy organizes contests of proposals for developing innovation networks. Based on an overview of the different programs, we investigate the advantages, problems and limitations of such an approach. We find that this type of policy may have a relatively large...