Maintaining economic output during COVID-19 pandemic can result in benefits for a firm's shareholders but comes at a potential cost to public health. Using novel retail store-level data, we examine how a CEO's political leanings, measured by political donations, impacts this tradeoff. We...

We study the impact of political institutions on foreign firms' choice of their U.S. cross-listing venue. Using two measures of political institutions (an index of political rights and a political constraint index) and controlling for various firm-level and country-level characteristics, we show...

Inspired by comments made by Allen (2017), Lueck (2017), Ménard (2017) and Smith (2017), this response clarifies and deepens the analysis in Arruñada (2017a). Its main argument is that to deal with the complexity of property we must abstract secondary elements, such as the physical dimensions...

The paper identifies what value blockchain adds to the contractual and property processes, exploring its potential and analyzing the main difficulties it is facing. It argues that, contrary to naive conceptions that proclaim the end of intermediaries and state involvement, blockchain...

We study the influence of policy uncertainty on the moral behavior of firms. When facing uncertainty, managers perceive various socioeconomic obstacles as more severe and disruptive to their business. Using data from policy uncertainty spouts in 93 countries, we document that some firms engage...

This book introduces three techniques for democratising the wealth of nations. The three techniques: Ownership Transfer Corporations (OTCs), Cooperative Land Banks (CLBs) and Producer-Consumer Cooperatives (PCCs), like Employee Share Ownership Plans (ESOPs), transfer wealth without taxes or...

Adopting a simplistic view of Coase (1960), most economic analyses of property rights disregard both the key advantage that legal property rights (that is, in rem rights) provide to rightholders in terms of enhanced enforcement, and the difficulties they pose to acquirers in terms of information...

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...

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...

Local governors who hold office for longer periods are thought to be more likely to collude with various groups to increase their own benefit through long-term interaction. There is no term limit for local governors in Japan, seemingly causing such collusive behavior. However, since 1987, local...