The authors develop a legal contract enforcement theory of the own versus lease decision. The allocation of ownership rights will minimize enforcement costs when the legal system is inefficient. In particular, when legal enforcement of contracts is costly, there will be a shift from arrangements that rely on such enforcement (such as a rental agreement) toward other forms that do not (such as direct ownership). The authors then test this prediction and show that costly enforcement of rental contracts hampers the development of the rental housing market in a cross-section of countries. They argue that this association is not the result of reverse causation from a developed rental market to more investor-protective enforcement and is not driven by alternative institutional channels. The results provide supportive evidence on the importance of legal contract enforcement for market development and the optimal allocation of property rights.
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Paper provided by Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia in its series Working Papers with number
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"Are Home Owners Really more Unemployed?,"
CAM Working Papers
2003-09, University of Copenhagen. Department of Economics. Centre for Applied Microeconometrics.
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Rafael La Porta & Florencio Lopez-de-Silanes & Andrei Shleifer & Robert W. Vishny, 1998.
"Law and Finance,"
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Rafael La Porta & Florencio Lopez-de-Silane & Andrei Shleifer & Robert W. Vishny, 1996.
"Law and Finance,"
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5661, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
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Simeon Djankov & Caralee McLiesh & Andrei Shleifer, 2005.
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11078, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
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