Drawing from Coase’s methodological lesson, this article discusses the specific case of knowledge, which was for a long time chiefly governed by exchange mechanisms lying outside the market, and has only recently been brought into the market. Its recent, heavy “colonization” by the property paradigm has progressively elicited criticism from commentators who, for various reasons, believe that the market can play only a limited role in pursuing efficiency in the knowledge domain. The article agrees with the enounced thesis and tries to provide an explanation of it that relates to the fact that in specific circumstances property-rights can produce distinct market failures that affect the social cost and can consequently prevent attainment of social welfare.
In particular, the arguments set forth here concern three distinct externalities that arise when enforcing a property rights system over knowledge. First, the existence of a property right may itself alter individual preferences and social norms, thus causing specific changes in individuals' behaviour. Second, the idiosyncratic nature of knowledge, as a collective and inherently indivisible entity, means that its full propertization can be expected to produce significant harm. Third, property rights can cause endogenous drifts in the market structure arising from the exclusive power granted to the right holder: though generally intended as a necessary mechanism for extracting a price from the consumer, in the knowledge domain property rights can become a device for extracting rents from the market.

Ever since the early days of National Income accounting we can observe periodic surges of demands to fix the measurement of GDP to better reflect progress, welfare or even happiness. In recent years even Presidents and Prime Ministers in Europe have joined the chorus of the discontent. In this paper I argue that the critique is mostly misguided. Welfare measurement has not been the objective of the GDP accounts especially since the late 1940s when National Accounts became a vehicle for applying Keynesian economics for, primarily, short run stabilization. I also argue that the search for a unique index of welfare, well-being, or happiness
is a chimera.

This study examines the factors affecting modes of commercializing patented inventions using a novel dataset based on a survey of U.S. inventors. We find that technological uncertainty and possessing complementary assets raise the propensity for internal commercialization. We find that R&D collaboration with firms in a horizontal relationship is likely to increase the propensity to license the invention. In addition, the paper shows that macro-level environment conditions that affect exchange conditions, such as technology familiarity, influence the effects of capabilities on governance choice.

We investigate the role of information on consumers’ valuation for food products containing genetically modified organisms (GMOs), using data from a specifically designed survey. We provide three main results. First, we show that introducing mandatory labels to identify whether or not a food product contains GMOs, significantly reduces consumers’ valuation. Second, adding to the label additional information on GMOs significantly affects valuation. Third, no matter the sign of the information previously received, consumers are more willing to trust General Practitioners (GPs), the information source they prefer most. Overall, these results indicate that the crucial issue is not the presence of the label per se, but the availability of the necessary information to make good use of the label content to assess potential health risks deriving from GM foods. In particular, our findings suggest that this can be achieved by properly informing (and convincing) GPs and other health professionals that risks for human health are minimal.

This article uses economic categories to show how the reorganisation of civil procedure in the case of class action is not merely
aimed at providing a more efficient litigation technology, as hierarchies (and company law) might do for other productive activities, but that it also serves to create a well defined economic organization ultimately aimed at producing a set of goods, first and foremost among which are justice and efficiency.
Class action has the potential to recreate, in the judicial domain, the same effects that individual interests and motivations, governed by the perfect competition paradigm, bring to the market. Moreover, through economic analysis it is possible to rediscover not only the productive function of this legal machinery, but also that partial compensation of victims and large profits for the class counsel, far from being a side-effect, are actually a necessary condition for reallocation of the costs and risks associated with the legal action.

In the paper we wish to examine if the firms that innovate know a higher growth than the firm that do not. We use diverse waves of CIS for the French industries over the period 1992-2004 and carry out different models and new econometric methods (quantile regression). Our main findings are that innovative firms produce more growth than non innovative firms. The estimates show that the results are robust to the different types of models that we have implemented. Process innovators are more productive in terms of growth than product innovators when OLS and Random effects models are used. The reverse is true for Fix effect model and quantile regression. In the three growth equations estimated by GMM the coefficients related to innovation product are always higher. Our study does not give definitive results with respect to the magnitude of the effects of the type of innovation on firm growth.

Water markets in Australia’s Murray-Darling Basin (MDB) and the US west are compared in terms of their ability to allocate scarce water resources. The study finds that the gains from trade in the MDB are worth hundreds of millions of dollars per year. Total market turnover in water rights exceeds $2 billion per year while the volume of trade exceeds over 20% of surface water extractions. In Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, and Texas, trades of committed water annually range between 5% and 15% of total state freshwater diversions with over $4.3 billion (2008 $) spent or committed by urban buyers between 1987 and 2008. The two-market comparison suggests that policy attention should be directed towards ways to promote water trade while simultaneously mitigating the legitimate thirdparty concerns about how and where water is used, especially conflicts between consumptive and in situ uses of water. The study finds that institutional innovation is feasible in both countries and that further understanding about the size, duration, and distribution of third-party effects from water trade, and how these effects might be regulated, can improve water markets to better manage water scarcity.

The objective of the paper is to identify some of the determinants of foreign investment of the largest multinational enterprises (MNEs) operating in the wine industry. The list of the largest MNEs has been compiled using financial databases and company websites.
The results of this study have some important implications. They indicate that location-specific advantages of host countries i.e. do provide an explication of the internationalization of firms in some preferred countries rather than others.

Although fiscal (de)centralization literature explains easily the centralization of taxes on the basis of a superior tax administration capacity, it finds more difficult to argue why in federal and decentralized systems subnational governments are ready to accept the demise of their taxing powers. This paper aims to contribute to the debate by analyzing the conditions under in which sub-national governments are willing to cede their taxing power to a central authority. A simple bargaining model is used to illustrate the choices available to both the central (federal) government and the sub-national governments (regions), where the main contribution lies in the introduction of the expenditure side of the budget and of its relevance for solving the commitment issue. We conclude that tax centralization will take place – transfers will prevail over sub-national taxes – if substantial efficiency gains from the centralized administration of taxes are expected. To support this conclusion, the paper presents evidence from decentralization processes in Argentina, Canada and Italy.