Essays
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Intellectual Property - Boldrin, Michele
Intellectual property is a propaganda term used by proponents of copyrights and patents to promote the idea that government‐enforced monopolies over ideas and parts of ideas share the beneficial effects of property. In fact, economic research shows that both copyrights and patents do more economic harm than good. In many areas, including copyright and software patents, the only reasonable policy conclusion is abolition. In other areas such as pharmaceutical products, a complex web of regulation and laws have grown around patent protection, and the best method of unraveling this web is still to be found. -
Property Rights and Development - Frye, Timothy
There is a strong consensus that secure property rights are critical for economic development, but tricky issues about the direction of causation and measurement have made it difficult to demonstrate this relationship empirically. In recent years, scholars have made progress on these issues. In the future, scholars can profitably turn their attention to four issues: (i) why privatization is so unpopular, (ii) how politics shapes property rights, (iii) the distributional consequences of property rights, and (iv) the impact of violence on property rights and economic development. -
The Public Nature of Private Property - Becher, Debbie
American legal academics describe private property as a set of private rights. However, liberal ideas of private control poorly describe legal practices, and thus the bundle of rights is a misleading metaphor for private property. Indeed, social theorists have long understood that property is not the ownership of a thing or a set of individual rights, but a set of social agreements about what ownership entails. In the late twentieth and early twenty‐first century, constituents have expected governments to protect the value in their properties, not just their control over the resources. Property rules involve government intimately not only in creating value but also in determining who deserves which valuable resources.