Property as an economic concept: Reconciling legal and economic conceptions of property rights in a Coasean framework

Benito Arruñada

Economics Working Papers from Department of Economics and Business, Universitat Pompeu Fabra

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: property rights; enforcement; transaction costs; registries. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D23 G38 H41 K11 K12 L85 O17 P48 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012-03
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
https://econ-papers.upf.edu/papers/1308.pdf Whole Paper (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Property as an Economic Concept: Reconciling Legal and Economic Conceptions of Property Rights in a Coasean Framework (2015)
Journal Article: Property as an economic concept: reconciling legal and economic conceptions of property rights in a Coasean framework (2012)
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: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:upf:upfgen:1308

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Economics Working Papers from Department of Economics and Business, Universitat Pompeu Fabra
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).