Categoria: wp2011

Abstract: 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.

Abstract: 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.

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 aimsto 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.

In the present paper we are going to examine texts by Werner Sombart and Friedrich
von Wieser on entrepreneurship and the capitalist economy using an interdisciplinary
approach focused on economics but also dealing with economic sociology and political
philosophy.

We believe that both authors have been largely neglected, thus overlooking
the main source of the theory of the entrepreneur in debates held in German language
and between Germany and Austria around the 1900s. Without excluding earlier major
references (such as Jean-Baptiste Say, the first French economist at the Collège de
France,) we shall demonstrate that for both our authors the entrepreneur is the keystone
of a renewed understanding of capitalism and the modern economy of their times.

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.