Despite the rapidly growing volume and economic importance of data in the digital economy, the legal framework for data ownership, access and trade remains incompletely defined in the EU and elsewhere. De facto data ownership dominates and often leads to fragmentation or anti-commons problems in...

By now, almost every business has an internet presence, and is likely engaged in e-commerce. What are the major risks perceived by those engaged in e-commerce and electronic payment systems? What potential risks, if they become reality, may cause substantial increases in operating costs or...

This paper expounds the latest main regulatory projects and industry-wide consultations in the United States (US), in the European Union (EU) and in the main economic countries where distributed ledgers (thereafter, “Blockchain”) regulations have been discussed, proposed and/or adopted. In...

Copyright law provides an excellent case study with which to study and evaluate Harold Demsetz's theory of property rights. Regardless of how one feels about the relationship between property and intellectual property, it is hard to escape the fact that intellectual property rights have expanded...

Patent thickets may inefficient retard cumulative innovation. This paper explores two alternative mechanisms that may be used to weed out patent thickets. Both mechanisms are intended to reduce the number of patents in our society. The first mechanism we discuss is price based regulation of...

We investigate the financial impact of social trust, institutional quality, and regulations. As a testing ground we employ a unique, large, and hand-crafted dataset of more than 850 000 lending-based crowdfunding projects from 155 platforms across 55 countries during 2005-2018. We show that the...

After several decades of improvement, water quality in the United States is getting worse, and the problem is primarily caused by run-off from non-point sources, such as farms and urban development. These non-point sources have never had regulatory mandates in the Clean Water Act, and have...