The prudent peasant mitigated the risk of crop failure by scattering his arable land Throughout his village, McCloskey argued, because formal insurance institutions did not exist. A Village of rational peasants facing idiosyncratic risks, Kimball replied, should have helped each other through...

The prevailing paradigm presumes that manufacturing guilds in medieval England monopolized markets for durable goods. The sources of the monopolies are said to have been the charters of towns, charters of guilds, parliamentary statutes, and judicial precedents.This essay examines those sources,...

Two fields of thought evolved simultaneously, but scholars in one ignored the evolution of the other. The first was the theory of monopoly, whose broad nineteenth-century definition narrowed considerably during the twentieth century. Concepts contained in its original incarnation attained...

Section 1 substantiates my claims about reputations. Section 2 corroborates my claims about insurance. Section 3 describes craft guilds' structure and the legal environment in which guilds operated. Section 4 establishes my argument's conceptual framework.

In emerging markets today, legal protections for intellectual property are weak and enforcement is lax. Counterfeiting of consumer goods and infringement on patents, copyrights, and trademarks cost corporations hundreds of billions of dollars each year. Strengthening laws and intensifying...