Property as an economic concept: Reconciling legal and economic conceptions of property rights in a Coasean framework
Abstract
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 asymmetry about legal title. Consequently, these analyses tend to overstate the role of "private ordering" and disregard the two key elements of property law: first, the essential conflict between property (that is, in rem) enforcement and transaction costs; and, second, the institutional solutions created to overcome it, mainly contractual registries capable of making truly impersonal (that is, asset-based) trade viable when previous relevant transactions on the same assets are not verifiable by judges. This paper fills this gap by reinterpreting both elements within the Coasean framework and thus redrawing the institutional foundations of both property and corporate contracting.Download Info
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the proper application to view it first. In case of further problems read the IDEAS help page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS site. Please be patient as the files may be large.Bibliographic Info
Paper provided by Department of Economics and Business, Universitat Pompeu Fabra in its series Economics Working Papers with number 1308.Length:
Date of creation: Mar 2012
Date of revision:
Handle: RePEc:upf:upfgen:1308
Contact details of provider:
Web page: http://www.econ.upf.edu/
Related research
Keywords: property rights; enforcement; transaction costs; registries.;Other versions of this item:
- Benito Arruñada, 2012. "Property as an economic concept: reconciling legal and economic conceptions of property rights in a Coasean framework," International Review of Economics, Springer, vol. 59(2), pages 121-144, July.
- Benito Arruñada, 2012. "Property as an Economic Concept: Reconciling Legal and Economic Conceptions of Property Rights in a Coasean Framework," Working Papers 614, Barcelona Graduate School of Economics.
- D23 - Microeconomics - - Production and Organizations - - - Organizational Behavior; Transaction Costs; Property Rights
- K11 - Law and Economics - - Basic Areas of Law - - - Property Law
- K12 - Law and Economics - - Basic Areas of Law - - - Contract Law
- L85 - Industrial Organization - - Industry Studies: Services - - - Real Estate Services
- G38 - Financial Economics - - Corporate Finance and Governance - - - Government Policy and Regulation
- H41 - Public Economics - - Publicly Provided Goods - - - Public Goods
- O17 - Economic Development, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economic Development - - - Formal and Informal Sectors; Shadow Economy; Institutional Arrangements
- P48 - Economic Systems - - Other Economic Systems - - - Political Economy; Legal Institutions; Property Rights; Natural Resources; Energy; Environment; Regional Studies
This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:
- NEP-ALL-2012-07-01 (All new papers)
References
References listed on IDEASPlease report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
- Lueck, Dean & Miceli, Thomas J., 2007.
"Property Law,"
Handbook of Law and Economics,
Elsevier.
- Dean Lueck & Thomas J. Miceli, 2004. "Property Law," Working papers 2004-04, University of Connecticut, Department of Economics.
- Wallis, John Joseph, 2011. "Institutions, organizations, impersonality, and interests: The dynamics of institutions," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 79(1), pages 48-64.
- Allen, Douglas W & Lueck, Dean, 1998. "The Nature of the Farm," Journal of Law and Economics, University of Chicago Press, vol. 41(2), pages 343-86, October.
- Barzel,Yoram, 1997. "Economic Analysis of Property Rights," Cambridge Books, Cambridge University Press, number 9780521597135.
- Antony Dnes & Dean Lueck, 2009. "Asymmetric Information and the Law of Servitudes Governing Land," The Journal of Legal Studies, University of Chicago Press, vol. 38(1), pages 89-120, 01.
Citations
Lists
This item is not listed on Wikipedia, on a reading list or among the top items on IDEAS.Statistics
Access and download statisticsCorrections
When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:upf:upfgen:1308For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: ().
If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.
If references are entirely missing, you can add them using this form.
If the full references list an item that is present in RePEc, but the system did not link to it, you can help with this form.
If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.
Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.