The Creation of Effective Property Rights

Herschel I. Grossman

No 7897, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Traditionally, general-equilibrium models have taken effective property rights to be given and have been concerned only with analysing the allocation of resources among productive uses and the distribution of the resulting product. But, this formulation of the economic problem is incomplete because it neglects that the appropriative activities by which people create the effective property rights that inform allocation and distribution are themselves an alternative use of scarce resources.This paper develops two canonical general-equilibrium models of resource allocation and income distribution that allow for the allocation of time and effort to the creation of effective property rights to valuable resources. In one model the valuable resources are initially in a common pool. In the other model agents initially have nonoverlapping claims to the valuable resources. For both models the analysis reveals how the amount of time and effort that agents allocate to the creation of effective property rights, rather than to production,depends on the environment for creating effective property rights, on the technology of production, and on the scale of the economy. The paper also analyses the security of initial claims to valuable resources and speculates about why initial claims sometimes are perfectly secure.

JEL-codes: D23 D74 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2000-09
Note: EFG
View list of references View citations in EconPapers

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w7897.pdf (application/pdf)
Access to the full text is generally limited to series subscribers, however if the top level domain of the client browser is in a developing country or transition economy free access is provided. More information about subscriptions and free access is available at http://www.nber.org/wwphelp.html.

Related works:
Working Paper: The Creation of Effective Property Rights (2000)
Journal Article: The Creation of Effective Property Rights (2001)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:7897

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w7897
The price is Paper copy available by mail.

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc
Address: National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.
Contact information at EDIRC.
Series data maintained by ().