Enforcement of Property Rights and Underdevelopment

The authors formalize the role of legal infrastructure in economic development in a general‐equilibrium model with endogenously determined property rights enforcement. The mutual importance of property rights protection and market production is illustrated by the model's multiplicity of equilibria. In one equilibrium, property rights are enforced, and market activity unhampered. In the other, property rights are not enforced, discouraging economic activity, which leaves the economy without the resources and the incentives to enforce property rights. Even identically endowed economies may therefore find themselves in very different equilibria.     

契约密集型货币:契约实施、产权和经济绩效

本文引入了一个客观地度量契约实施及产权安全性的指标,即契约密集型货币(contract-intensive money),或简称为CIM.它建立在人们选择以何种方式持有金融资产的决策基础之上.不同国家的案例研究表明,作为对政治事件的反映,CIM按照本文预测的方式随时变化.研究还表明,CIM和一国的投资额、经济增长率及依赖契约部门的相对规模存在正相关关系.     

Enforcement of Intellectual Property,Pollution Abatement,and Directed Technical Change

We theoretically investigate the interaction between endogenous enforcement of intellectual property rights (IPRs) and tax-financed pollution abatement measures. IPRs affect dirty and clean intermediates alike such that higher IPR enforcement may promote the transition to the clean technology, if this technology is productive enough. If the green technology is relatively unproductive, higher IPRs promote the dirty technology while pollution is increasing. As households are due to subsistence consumption subject to a hierarchy of needs, the level of IPR enforcement as well as the level of abatement measures depends on the state of technology and is increasing during economic development. Thus, if the incentive to enforce IPRs is low the level of abatement measures is also low. This argument provides a theoretical foundation for the observed clash of interests in international negotiation rounds regarding the harmonization of IPR protection and actions to combat climate change.     

Contract-Intensive Money: Contract Enforcement, Property Rights, and Economic Performance

We introduce a new, easily accessed and objective measure of the enforceability of contracts and the security of property rights. This measure, called contract-intensive money or CIM, is based on citizens decisions regarding the form in which they choose to hold their financial assets. Country case studies show that CIM varies over time in response to political events in ways predicted by our arguments. We also show that CIM is positively related to investment and growth rates, and to the relative size of contract-dependent sectors of the economy.     

Progressive Lending as an Enforcement Mechanism in Microfinance Programs

Microfinance programs are often characterized by progressive lending. A typical borrower receives at first very small amounts, which increase with good repayment conduct. The author rationalizes this feature of microfinance. It is shown that there is a strong tendency to split up projects into subprojects, and that it might be necessary to perform less productive projects first in order to keep pressure on the borrower to repay.     

Organized Labor and Institutional Economics

This presidential address to the Association for Evolutionary Economics was delivered at the annual meeting in San Diego, California, on January 5, 2013.     

Tax Enforcement Problems

We study an income tax enforcement problem using a principal-agent model where the government sets the tax and inspection functions. These are announced to the agents and there is no commitment problem. The penalty function for dishonest taxpayers is given exogenously and satisfies certain social norms. We prove that, for a large family of penalty functions, this policy is such that honesty implies regressiveness. This result does not depend on the fact that agents know the true probability of inspection.     

生态物权:一种以生态价值为媒介的新型物权

随着物的生态功能的被重视,物的生态价值也因环境问题而成为显性价值,故将其纳入法的调整范畴,是一种必然。将生态价值视为一种公共资源或公共产品难以避免"公地悲剧",在环境问题事业与产业并举的当下,以物的生态价值为媒介,从私法角度去构建相关法律制度,运用经济杠杆引导民众行为,是构建生态文明社会法律制度的一条可行路径。基于此提出的生态物权是指以生态物的生态价值为媒介,建立在生态物之上,以生态增益者收益和生态消耗者负担为内容的一项他物权。     

Organized medicine's new turf: e-services

Stodgy medical societies are partnering with, and creating, online companies. What can they do for your practice?     

《物权法》的实施与供应链金融——来自应收账款质押融资的经验证据

利用中国上市公司对质押贷款披露的独特数据,本文以2007年我国《物权法》的实施为切入点,具体从应收账款质押融资的角度研究了我国上市公司的供应链金融。本文的研究结果表明:在2007年《物权法》实施之后,无论是国有还是民营上市公司,其利用应收账款质押融资的行为都有所增强。进一步的研究发现:国有公司和所处地区金融发展水平比较高的公司会更多的利用应收账款质押融资;应收账款客户集中度会弱化公司利用应收账款质押融资的行为,客户为民营性质的上市公司更容易获得应收账款质押融资。本文的研究不仅在供应链金融、债权人保护以及商业信用融资三个方面弥补了国内外现有研究的不足,而且对于完善我国《物权法》和更好的推广供应链金融服务,尤其在发挥应收账款质押融资在解决我国企业融资难问题中的作用方面具有一定的启示意义。     

Antitrust Enforcement and Non-Enforcement as a Barrier to Import in the Japanese Automobile Industry

Foreign automobile manufacturers long have found it difficult to compete in the Japanese automobile market. For decades, governmentally imposed restraints prevented foreign manufacturers from gaining a foothold in the Japanese market. In recent decades, these governmental restrictions have been replaced by private restraints which create equally formidable barriers to entry. Many private restraints persist despite repeated informal investigations and administrative guidance by the Japan Fair trade Commission (JFTC). The endurance of these private restraints raises the question of what mechanisms may be available to make the Japanese automobile market more contestable. While vigorous and transparent enforcement of Japan's Antimonopoly Law by the JFTC is the preferred mechanism, other mechanisms for alleviating these private restraints include the extraterritorial enforcement of U.S. antitrust laws by U.S. antitrust enforcement authorities, mediation by the OECD or the enforcement of an international competition code in an international forum.     

Some Reflections on The Calculus of Consent

Buchanan and Tullock claim in The Calculus of Consent that their analysis does not depend for its validity on the assumption of homo economicus. Some thirty years later Brennan and Buchanan argued that homo economicus is the relevant assumption for institutional design. If the prime task of comparative institutional analysis is conceived to be how the views and interests held by one individual can be reconciled with the views and interests of others, then either altruistic or self-centred behavior can be relevant to the analysis depending on the case at hand. Buchanan and Tullock's claim is therefore not without some justification.     

Property and Economic Power as Issues in Institutional Economics

In the first part of this two-part paper, I presented an "irenic" reconciliation of the three apparently contradictory definitions of "institution" within original institutional economics (OIE), employing the methodology of critical institutionalism. The critical institutionalist reconciliation of these definitions conceptualizes institutions as an emergent process by which the internal and necessary relations of social structure as collective action, mediated through agency, results in the control, expansion, and liberation of the individual action of social actors in transactions. In short, an institution is the emergent process of social structure actualized in transactions (social action). Institutions, therefore, not only have a structural existence, but also an actual existence as they are the process of the emergence of the actual (in transactions) from the structural. Institutions are multi-level processes and cannot be reduced to structures, actions, behaviors, or patterns of behaviors. In this part, I demonstrate the significance of this reconciliation in two areas. The first is its ability to further differentiate the institutional definition of economics as "the science of social provisioning" from the mainstream definition of economics as "a relationship between ends and scarce means" by decomposing the institutional definition into its productive and distributive processes. The second is its usefulness in modeling the interaction of non-economic social institutions with economic institutions at varying levels of detail. I also introduce critical institutional analysis, and use as a method, for model-building and use it to build models of communal, feudal, and industrial capitalist economies.     

Word-Of-Mouth Communication and Community Enforcement

We study a repeated game where a seller, who has a short-term incentive to supply low quality, is periodically matched with a randomly selected buyer. Buyers observe only the outcomes of their neighbors' games and may receive signals from them. When the buyer population is large, the seller may sell high quality even when each buyer observes her action in any given period with an arbitrarily small probability. When networking among buyers is costly, low quality is always supplied with a positive probability. For this case, we characterize an equilibrium where the seller randomizes between high and low quality.     

Enforcement in informal saving groups

Informal groups cannot rely on external enforcement to insure that members abide by their obligations. It is generally assumed that these problems are solved by ‘social sanctions’ and reputational effects. The present paper focuses on roscas, one of the most commonly found informal financial institutions in the developing world. We first show that, in the absence of an external (social) sanctioning mechanism, roscas are never sustainable, even if the defecting member is excluded from all future roscas. We then argue that the organizational structure of the rosca itself can be designed so as to address enforcement issues. The implications of our analysis are consistent with first-hand evidence from rosca groups in a Kenyan slum.     

Law Enforcement and Legal Presumptions

We compare two alternative legal presumptions, one more pro-defendant than the other, with the objective of reducing bureaucratic corruption to any target level at minimum social costs, broadly defined to include law enforcement costs, trial costs, and verdict error costs. In the absence of collusion possibilities between law enforcers and offenders, presumption of innocence involves lower social costs for low corruption targets while presumption of guilt has a cost advantage for high corruption targets. Allowing for collusion enlarges the corruption range over which the presumed innocence rule will dominate. However, there are two possible exceptions to this outcome, namely, if the government's law enforcement budget is limited and if the offenders can be penalized only up to a maximum permissible limit. In each of these cases, presumption of guilt may become the cost-effective rule. J. Comp. Econ., December 2001, 29(4), pp. 722–748. Bilkent University, Bilkent 06533, Ankara, Turkey; and Department of Economics and Finance, Birkbeck College, University of London, 7-15 Gresse Street, London W1T 1LL, United Kingdom. © 2001 Elsevier ScienceJournal of Economic Literature Classification Numbers: D73, D78, K41, K42.     

Dynamic Law Enforcement with Learning

This article modifies a standard model of law enforcement toallow for learning by doing. We incorporate the process of enforcementlearning by assuming that the agency's current marginal costis a decreasing function of its past experience of detectingand convicting. The agency accumulates data and information(on criminals, on opportunities of crime), enhancing the abilityof future apprehension at a lower marginal cost. We focus onthe impact of enforcement learning on optimal compliance rules.In particular, we show that the optimal fine could be less thanmaximal and the optimal probability of detection could be higherthan otherwise. It is also suggested that the optimal imprisonmentsentence could be higher than otherwise.     

Negotiated Enforcement and Credible Deterrence

This paper develops a model of law enforcement in which indicted offenders and the prosecutor can negotiate the penalty prior to the completion of the investigation. The analysis focuses on the credibility of the conviction threat: the prosecutor cannot commit to any predetermined level of investigative effort should the negotiation fail. The settlement stage introduces several new features of the optimal enforcement policy, including the possibility that maximal sanctions may not be optimal. We show that the screening process associated with the negotiation stage reduces the incentives for the prosecutor to undertake thorough investigations and increases the rate of noncompliance.     

强化知识产权保护与南北双赢

传统观点认为,强知识产权保护有利于北方国家而有损于南方国家。本文构建一个两期技术转移模型,说明在一定条件下,南方国家会自愿加强知识产权保护,并实现南北双赢。假设北方企业拥有两种技术,即传统技术和先进技术。若南方的知识产权保护太弱,北方企业可能会因为害怕被模仿而策略性延迟引入先进技术,导致南方国家受损。此时,南方政府将有积极性自愿加强知识产权保护以防止北方企业采用延迟策略,而模型分析表明,最优的知识产权保护力度是南方企业模仿能力的倒U型函数。进一步,如果是否拥有先进技术是北方企业的私人信息,南方政府将更不愿意采用严格的知识产权保护制度,因而消除信息不对称有利于南方国家自愿强化知识产权保护。