The telecommunications sector in Africa presents many exciting prospects to international investors - indeed many billion dollar projects are already underway across the continent. Many of the continent's current problems can be traced to the exploitation it has experienced whilst 'doing...

Recent research regarding property rights and economic development often treats property rights security in a country as homogeneous, although protecting the private entitlements of some can entail preventing others from claiming and controlling those same resources. This one-dimensional...

This paper analyzes the difficulties of comparing the respective effectiveness of two among the most important liability regimes in tort law: rule of negligence and strict liability. Starting from the standard Shavellian unilateral accident scheme, I show that matching up liability regime on...

Economists have traditionally treated preferences as exogenously given. Preferences are assumed to be influenced by neither beliefs nor the constraints people face. As a consequence, changes in behaviour are explained exclusively in terms of changes in the set of feasible alternatives. Here we...

To explore damage rules' deterrent effect, we use a public good experiment to tailor allowable punishment to rules used in actual civil litigation. The experimental treatments are analogous to: (1) damages limited to harm to an individual litigant, (2) damages limited to harm to a group...

The share of privately paid medical care is steadily increasing. Polish patients pay immediately for single services and may also privately conclude the contracts for medical insurance or subscription (steady access to complex private medical care). The aim of this paper is to draw the reader's...

Berle and Means's analysis of the corporation - in particular, their view that those in control are not the owners of the corporation - raises questions about actions that corporations take to counter concerns regarding management's influence. What mechanisms, if any, do corporations implement...

Purpose - We search for determinants of the change in homicides over time by analyzing the interconnection between a high incidence of murders and the socioeconomic environment, using Puerto Rico as the case study. This case presents intriguing facts that challenge some of the conventional crime...

This paper reviews the literature on the economics of intellectual property rights (IPR), with a particular focus on the main industrial property rights of patents and trade marks. Intellectual property rights arise from the legal protection accorded to certain inventions or creations. We begin...