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...

Spanish Abstract: Este artículo explora la correspondencia entre las preferencias dominantes en la ciudadanía y varios atributos característicos del Derecho español. En relación con países europeos de similar tamaño, los españoles mostramos en promedio unas marcadas preferencias...

Registering originative business contracts allows entrepreneurs and creditors to choose, and courts to enforce market-friendly ldquo;contractrdquo; rules that protect innocent third parties when adjudicating disputes on subsequent contracts. This reduces information asymmetry for third parties,...

Most economic interactions happen in a context of sequential exchange in which innocent third parties suffer information asymmetry with respect to previous ldquo;originativerdquo; contracts. The law reduces transaction costs by protecting these third parties but preserves some element of consent...

Initiatives in electronic conveyancing and registration show the potential of new technologies to transform such systems, reducing costs and enhancing legal security. However, they also incur substantial risks of transferring costs and risks among registries, conveyancers and rightholders,...

Simplifying business formalization and eliminating outdated formalities is often a good way of improving the institutional environment for firms. Unfortunately, the World Bank's Doing Business project is harming such policies by promoting a reform agenda that gives them priority even in...

Legislators have been using audit and financial crises as excuses to introduce additional regulation into an industry that is already over-regulated. This practice is questioned here because of the ability of the free market to punish audit failures, the dynamism shown by participants in...

Recurrent difficulties are delaying what for the time being are still modest applications of blockchain. This paper identifies what value this new technology adds to the contractual and property processes, exploring its potential and analyzing the main difficulties it is facing. Paying...

In his important article, Benito Arrunada draws out the significance of sequential exchange for property rights and traces inadequacies in the economics of property rights to its overly contractual focus, to the exclusion of multiple transactions on the same asset. In this comment, I argue that...

To investigate the relationship between the depth of strategic thinking and social preferences we ask subjects in an experiment to perform dictator games and a guessing game. The guessing game measures depth of strategic thinking while dictator games control for social preferences. When...