The main thesis of this article is that individuals should own their user-held data. Rapidly developing data processing technologies empowers individuals to collect their data from different sources and retain it in personal data clouds. Such user-held data represents the most accurate,...

Formal private property rights (“FPPRs”) have been advocated as an important prerequisite to economic development: a legal right to property ownership motivates economic players to engage in economic activities when these activities yield property interests, and this, in turn, contributes to...

This J.S.M. thesis examines whether Costa Rican legal rules in the 1970s regulating renters, sharecroppers, and others who farmed land that they did not own were functional or not in promoting development. It considered the history of agricultural activity and pattern of land ownership from the...

This Chapter, forthcoming in The Routledge Handbook on Property, Law and Society, the maps the intertwinement, mutual construction, and dependence of “property” and “race” with each other. The discussion examines three dimensions of property which demonstrate the socio-cultural,...

This chapter develops a unified analytical framework, drawing on and extending the existing literature on the subject, for studying the role of property rights in economic development. It addresses two fundamental and related questions concerning the relationship between property rights and...

This article examines the use of the term “possessory title” to denominate the interest that is acquired by a person, B, when (and because) B takes possession of another person’s (A’s) tangible chattel. It contends that, depending on the exact meaning ascribed to the term “possessory...

Human capital investment may be affected by programs aimed at giving legal ownership titles to the occupants of land; these are called "land titling programs". Titling is associated with an income (or wealth) effect as it induces higher expenditure on normal goods like home consumption, education...

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...

Since Calabresi & Melamed's seminal article on property rules and liability rules, numerous law and economic articles have debated the efficiency of these two rules. Many of the follow-up articles contend that Calabresi & Melamed are wrong in arguing that property rules are more efficient when...

This article analyzes alternative rules for settling conflicts between right owner and a bona fide purchaser. The optimal rule, so it is argued, is the one which maximizes the expected value of the ownership right, given the risk of right violation. In order to maximize this value, one must seek...