Property as an Economic Concept: Reconciling Legal and Economic Conceptions of Property Rights in a Coasean Framework

Benito Arruñada
Authors registered in the RePEc Author Service: Benito Arruñada

No 614, Working Papers from Barcelona School of Economics

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.

Keywords: transaction costs; enforcement; Property rights; registries (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D23 G38 H41 K11 K12 L85 O17 P48 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015-09
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

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Related works:
Journal Article: Property as an economic concept: reconciling legal and economic conceptions of property rights in a Coasean framework (2012)
Working Paper: Property as an economic concept: Reconciling legal and economic conceptions of property rights in a Coasean framework (2012)
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