Volume 8, Issue 1

This paper presents a simple mechanism for allocating a single good in partnership dissolution. Since in the areas of probate, family, partnership and bankruptcy law the establishment of the value of assets is essential this mechanism can be useful. We illustrate its application for the case of determining the value of a house in a divorce proceeding. We show that when transactions costs are permitted, our mechanism shows a wider range of equilibrium outcomes than existing mechanisms such as Texas shootouts, implying it offers more equal and fair divisions. In addition, if private valuations of an asset are allowed, the proposed mechanism has an advantage based on the efficiency criterion compared to Texas shootouts.

Innovation is fundamental to sustainable economic development because input resources are finite. When an economy faces constraints such as land and labour, innovation fuels continued growth through new technologies that utilises the limited resources more productively. Competition contributes to this process by providing a platform for new technologies to replace old ones, but excessive competition may also dampen the incentives to innovate. Unlike economics literature which typically examines how market structure affects innovation, this paper explores how innovation affects the market structure. We observe that, as innovative businesses are scalable, markets are becoming more concentrated from a static point of view. However, as disruptive innovation takes place in the broader ecosystem of separate but related markets, product life cycles shorten, and these concentrated markets become more competitive from a dynamic point of view. We also find that innovative products often do not conform to existing regulations. In order to unleash the full potential of innovation as a driving force for sustained economic growth, we recommend a rebalancing of competition law and policy towards stronger enforcement against lateral anti-competitive activities versus horizontal and vertical ones. We also recommend more emphasis on dynamic competition analysis versus static ones in regulatory decision-making.

In 2005, India witnessed a constitutional amendment to the Hindu Succession Act of 1956. It gave daughters equal inheritance rights as sons. However, five states in India had earlier amended the same Act in favor of daughters. Using this exogenous variation created by legislation of inheritance property rights, we exploit a difference-in-difference estimation strategy to estimate the impact of reform on female education, labor force participation and daughters’ educational attainment. The study finds that women who were exposed to the reform experience have greater average schooling years, and average months of employment. It is interesting to note that this positive effect is also observed for their daughters’ educational attainments. These finding are explained by improvement in their bargaining power in the household that further improves women’s autonomy in decision making. Results obtained from this study are consistent with the non-cooperative household bargaining models that which treats changes in inheritance laws as a positive shock to distribution factors which impact the intra-household bargaining. Our results are robust to alternative model specifications.

In light of the limitation of normative narratives of Chinese jurisprudence, this article proposes a functional interpretation of how the law evolved in China and how the jurisprudence was formalized to cope with major social challenges in the society. Through an examination on historiographical findings and official documentation, the article outlines the extent to which legal norms and institutions succeed in accommodating dominant social consciousness in a particular context, and reveals the interplay between norms and mechanisms respectively in ancient China (around 400 B.C. to the mid-19th century) and modern China (the late 19th century to the 20th century) respectively. The article concludes that in China’s transformational context where people are on a frequent mobility and tend to be assertive toward the government, the jurisprudent shift is likely to be formulated in favor of procedural fairness, insensitive to kinship relations and political beliefs. The shift so too allows one to predict the governant reactions to individual claims.