Adopting a simplistic view of Coase (1960), most economic analyses of property rights disregard both the key advantage that legal property rights (that is, in rem rights) provide to rightholders in terms of enhanced enforcement, and the difficulties they pose to acquirers in terms of information...

This book explains how public registries strengthen property rights and reduce transaction costs, analyzes the main tradeoffs in their organization, and proposes principles for successfully developing registries in countries at different stages of development. The book focuses on land and...

We investigate the complementarity between informal communities and formal government enforcement of norms of reciprocation and exchange. We introduce a model in which people exchange informally within their community as well as externally on a market. We show that informal community and formal...

Globally, real estate trade is highly regularized. Usually, the market value is not negotiated simply between the seller and potential buyer but based on an assessment performed by a professional valuer, known as a surveyor or appraiser. This paper inquires about the economic role of valuers in...

This paper provides an empirical test of the Engerman–Sokoloff hypothesis that factor endowments influenced the development of the rule of law, which in turn has perpetuated income inequality. Using a measure of the suitability of land for growing wheat relative to sugarcane as an instrument...

We empirically quantify the sensitivity of investments to uncertain property rights by drawing upon the Northern Pacific's massive land grant and the ensuing political and legal battle that generated significant uncertainty to title. To overcome the empirical challenge that property rights and...

Patent, copyright, trade secret, and other exclusionary laws regarding intellectual property convert new-product research and development from a public/common good into a private good. To the extent that R&D is a private good, the argument that it, as a public good, needs to be subsidized...

The purveyance of the rule of law in developing countries has frequently been associated with positive economic development. Better clarity, scope, transparency and enforcement of the laws will promote confidence and trust in the formal legal system, the argument suggests. At its core, this...

Fiduciary law is both celebrated as unbound by rules and deplored as unprincipled. Moralists see in fiduciary law a fixed and mandatory system, even as legal economists and contractarians have cast fiduciary law as the ultimate set of defaults to fill in incomplete contracts. Like general...