This paper analyzes the importance of legal property documents in providing tenure security, enhancing agricultural investment incentives and easing access to credit. While theory predicts that better property rights on land can increase investment through increased security, enhanced trade...

There is well-known debate about the respective role of geography versus institutions in explaining the long term development of countries. These debates have usually been based on cross country regressions where questions about parameter heterogeneity, unobserved heterogeneity, and endogeneity...

The literature on the licensing of an innovation has mainly focused on some speci c contract types. We show within the framework of a fairly general model that removing these contractual limitations will lead to extreme market outcomes. Speci cally, we nd that when the patentee can employ...

This paper analyzes the consequences of radical patent-regime change by exploiting a natural experiment: the forced adoption of the Prussian patent system in territories annexed after the Austro-Prussian War of 1866. Compared to other German states, Prussia granted patents more restrictively by...

Innovation is the key term of development in the modern world. Although it is of the utmost importance, there is still a lot to be done to popularize the idea of innovation, to ensure a common approach to the necessity of providing incentives, and of tightening the relevant legislation ensuring...

This paper develops a benchmarking method in order to assess how legal and regulatory frameworks provide adequate incentives for entrepreneurship. The analysis is based on a dataset that combines individual data on entrepreneurship with indicators about the restrictiveness of regulations. The...

Latent payback is a natural element of social interactions: Non-cooperators face substantial threats of not being supported in situations of dire need, or of being punished in seemingly unrelated situations. In the controlled environment of the laboratory, we experimentally explore the effects...

Memory is important, also for Economics. The ephemeris can be used not only as moments of who relives the past in a single-rewind-perspective but of those who use these occasions to reflect on the past and to project the future from it. 1995 was a special year for fisheries in Portugal. Never...