We start out from the hypothesis that limited government leads to low uncertainty and low transaction costs. If political institutions affect the degree of uncertainty and transaction costs, we formally show they should affect the steady state level of income per capita. The impact of...

Property in financial options (derivatives) is stated and transferred through contracts, while in real options property may arise from assets under the management of the firm, without a formal contract properly defining property. Furthermore, in some situations the asset can be public, and its...

This paper focuses on the role of institutions in enhancing economic growth. Attention to the institutional environment has become increasingly common in economic history and it has deeply enriched our understanding of how economies develop through time. Economic development is no longer...

Recent empirical work increasingly points to imperfect intellectual property rights as an important determinant of firm's organization strategy.This paper argues that imperfect intellectual property rights, and the ensuing im- portance of reducing information leakages outside innovating firms...

Over the course of history, different legal instruments for protecting intellectual property have emerged. These instruments differ in their subject matter, extent of protection, and field of application, reflecting society's objective to balance the interests of creators and consumers for...

Although property rights are the cornerstone of capitalist economics, throughout history existing claims have been frequently overturned and redefined by revolution. A fundamental question for economists is what makes revolutions more likely to occur. A large literature has found contradictory...

This paper develops a simple model to show how social insurance affects the desire to revolt against property rights. It then tests for the effect of social insurance on revolt by introducing a panel data set derived from surveys across 200,000 randomly sampled individuals from the 1970s to the...

This paper analyzes competing models of dismissal regulation from a Law and Economics perspective, using the contemporary US and UK dismissal regimes as a comparative benchmark. The regulation of dismissals in the UK and US differs widely in spite of their joint common-law tradition. Whereas the...

Institutions do matter. Property rights protection, the quality of the legal system, the development of the financial system, the quality of the government, corruption and many other softer institutional aspects have been shown to be the reasons behind dramatic historical success or failure...