Previous studies have found a strong impact of secure property rights on land use (land tenure), land values and land-specific investment. One of the major difficulties confronted by empirical studies in this literature is that although it is generally easy to find an impact of secure property rights on land-related variables, these results are not valid unless one controls for the endogeneity of property rights. One example of reverse causality is when rented and sharecropped land attracts invasion by landless peasants exploiting pro-squatter constitutional rights, as in the case of Brazil (contract choice affects property rights). In order to account for such effects it is necessary to find suitable instruments for land conflict (secure property rights). In this paper we propose a novel instrument for land conflict in Brazil, a country that provides an excellent opportunity for studying property rights and land tenure, given the wide variation in property rights security across Brazil. We propose to use the number of priests across counties as an instrument for land conflict. Brazil is the largest Catholic country in the world, both in area and in Catholic population. Importantly, the Brazilian Catholic Church has historically been one of the most progressive branches, especially in the 1970s as “Liberation Theology” swept through Latin America. Catholic priests provided the organizational skills to galvanize the landless peasants to overcome the inherent free-rider problem of large scale land invasions. We also argue that the Landless Peasants Movement, beginning the late 1980s, drew their motivation from the activities of priests. Today the Landless Peasants Movement accounts for the majority of land invasions/conflicts in Brazil. Whereas there is good reason to expect the number of priests to affect the number of conflicts in a given region, there is no apparent reason why the presence of priests would have a direct impact on land tenure. We use a panel for all of the 5,561 counties (municipios) in Brazil in 1985 and 1996 and show that the presence of priests effectively instruments for conflict (security of property rights) and allows for consistent estimation of its impact on land tenure.

In the second part of the paper we will estimate the impact of land conflict on land tenure. As recently as the 1970s the rental rate for farms in Brazil was approximately 50% which was close to the OECD and North American averages. By 1996 the rental rate in Brazil had declined to 12%. We wish to test two hypotheses for the decline in land rentals: 1) Many landowners are afraid to rent land because it might prompt an invasion/conflict which could cause the government to expropriate the land; and 2) changes in relative prices has caused changes from labor intensive to capital intensive crops which in turn could cause rentals to decline, e.g. coffee to soya. We will use the same panel of counties to test these hypotheses for their impact across the various tenure categories: owner-occupied; rented, sharecropped, squatted; pasture; and usable but unused land.

Our results will have policy implications concerning land reform. To the extent that land conflict reduces land rental it is blocking one of the avenues for economic mobility of farmers. A better land reform policy may include government assisted mortgages, and the purchase of “usable but unused” hectares for redistribution.

This article proposes a positive bargaining theory for intellectual property-based technologies in the post-WTO era. It focuses on negotiations between patent-sensitive industries and developing countries over legal endowments and access conditions in an archetypical patent-sensitive industry, namely the pharmaceutical industry. The ability on the part of developing countries to issue, or threaten to issue, compulsory licenses over pharmaceutical products serves as a working example.

The article's analysis of the bargaining power possessed by developing countries combines a conventional assessment of market size with a qualitative analysis that highlights the effects of these countries' propensity to innovate. The ensuing bargaining situation yields numerous insights, the primary ones being as follows: Firstly, innovation in intellectual property-based technologies, such as within the fields of pharmaceuticals, software, information communication technologies (ICTs), and plant genetics, creates a paradoxical effect within the group of innovative Newly Industrialized

Countries (NICs). The paradox is based on the notion that innovation weakens, rather than boosts, the countries' bargaining power vis-à-vis the prospect of bargaining retaliations. This conspicuously is the case of the prospects of issuance of compulsory licenses over pharmaceutical patents.
Secondly, the resulting bargaining dynamic deemphasizes the practical significance of the Least-Developed-Country (LDC) carve-out contained in the TRIPS and other WTO agreements.

Specifically, it is argued, distributive justice policies contained in TRIPS should be geared toward a broader group of weak developing countries extending beyond the group of LDCs. This theory points out to a tentative threefold typology of developing countries, defined based on their bargaining power. Accordingly, developing countries are modeled as HBPs, MBPs, and LBPs depending on whether they are relatively high-, medium-, or low-bargaining power countries, respectively.

In its conclusion, this article contends, based on the model presented, that strong protection of intellectual property rights could have significant negative allocative consequences for developing countries. Such is the case without contributing to--and even impeding--their technological development. Arguably, the HBP-MBP-LBP underlying developmental inequality shifts the optimal balance between static and dynamic efficiencies. In that sense, TRIPS may prove ineffective in promoting dynamic long-term innovation policies for developing countries.

Recent research has studied new career formats in boundaryless and networked organizations. In parallel, economic sociologists have provided new insights on the evolution of organizational fields.

Drawing on recent research on organizational fields, and on careers in creative industries, this paper offers a methodological approach for analysing how career paths behave and interact within different field contexts. I apply blockmodeling analysis of relational data among musicians with twofold objectives: first, establish ideal-typical career paths, second, map the field development vis-à-vis individual positioning and style evolution. For that purpose, I investigated the Jazz field and its musicians from 1930 to 1969. Relational data was collected from recording sessions. Within this period, this field migrated from a normative to a competitive structure, which allows us to understand how career types patterns of interaction change, as well as the logics of dominance and establishment of new styles. Results indicate that, in spite of a polarized transition period, co-optation of incumbent musicians by new ones was crucial for implementing the new structure. New elites performed a trade-off between stability and freedom of innovation. I conclude with suggestions on how these findings could be explored in other fields.

Entrepreneurial groups face a twinned challenge: recognizing new ideas and implementing them. Recent research suggests that connectivity reaching outside the group channels new ideas, while closure makes it possible to act on them. By contrast, we argue that entrepreneurship is not about importing ideas but about generating new knowledge by recombining resources. In contrast to the brokerage-plus-closure perspective, we identify a distinctive network position, intercohesion, which is found at the overlap of cohesive group structures. The multiple insiders at this intercohesive position participate in dense cohesive ties that provide close familiarity with the operations of the members in their groups. Because they are members of multiple cohesive groups, they have familiar access to diverse resources. First, we test whether intercohesion contributes to higher group performance. Second, because entrepreneurship is a process of creative disruption, we test intercohesion’s contribution to group instability. Third, we move from dynamic methods to historical network analysis and demonstrate that coherence is a property of interwoven lineages of cohesion that are built up through an ongoing pattern of separation and reunification. Business groups use this pattern of interweaving to manage instability while benefitting from intercohesion. To study the evolution of business groups, we construct a dataset that records personnel ties among the largest 1,696 Hungarian enterprises from 1987–2001.

What are the goals, tools and arrangements that the legal apparatus offer to developmental strategies aiming at strengthen state capacity, fostering growth and reducing inequalities? The presentation will explore the possible relationships between law and development assuming that while the law is constitutive to development, it can work both as an enabling tool or obstacle

This article presents a research about the effects of segregation and social networks on poverty. The majority of the studies about poverty focus on individual elements, and even when considering supra-individual processes, understands them as environmental constrains on individual attributes.

Differently, we consider fundamental to focus the relational and segregation patters, which together account for social contacts. We conducted fieldwork in seven differentially segregated poor locations in São Paulo. In total, 210 personal networks were constructed, plus 30 middle-class networks to allow comparison. The data permitted to: (i) characterize the networks in different conditions of segregation; (ii) explore their diversity and their main conditioning factors; and (iii) analyze their influence on urban poverty.

The results show that, although the networks of the poor are smaller, less diverse and more local, they also vary substantially and some types of networks are more associated with poverty. Quantitative analysis also showed that not only networks help explain income variation, but also explain a larger proportion of the phenomena than traditional variables such as years of schooling and job status.

This paper establishes a relationship between the observability of common shocks and optimal organizational design under a multiagent moral hazard environment. The choices of organization and investment on information about common shocks are determined jointly, in a Walrasian equilibrium model where the commodities traded are memberships in organizations. Numerical results reveal that both cooperative and individualistic regimes can coexist in equilibrium. We show that, with sufficient information about common shocks, a cooperative organization will be optimal even when outputs are highly correlated. This contradicts the conventional result from Holmstrom and Milgrom (1990), but is consistent with the empirical observation that cooperative arrangements may be more prevalent when outputs are correlated. Indeed, when organization and investment on information are jointly determined, the relationship between correlation of outputs and organization is subtler. The interplay between organization, investment in information, and inequality is thus analyzed.

We present a general model of the interaction between settlement and the emergence of de facto property rights on frontiers prior to governments establishing and enforcing de jure property rights.

Settlers have an incentive to establish de facto property rights to avoid the dissipation associated with open access conditions. The potential rent associated with more exclusivity drives the “demand’ for commons arrangements. As the potential rental stream from land increases due to enhanced scarcity there is a greater demand for more exclusivity beyond what can be sustained with commons arrangements. In some instances claimants will petition the government for de jure property rights to their claims – formal titles. In other instances it may be cheaper to acquire titles through fraudulent means. To the extent that governments supply property rights to those with first possession, land conflict will be minimal. But, governments face differing political constituencies and may not allocate de jure rights to the current claimants. Moreover, governments may assign de jure rights but not be willing to enforce the rights. This may generate potential or actual conflict over land depending on the violence potentials held by the de facto and de jure land claimants. We examine land settlement and land conflict on the frontiers of Australia, the U.S. and Brazil. We are particularly interested in examining the emergence, sustainability, and collapse of commons arrangements in specific historical contexts. Our analysis indicates that on all three frontiers the emergence of demand driven de facto property rights arrangements was relatively peaceful in Australia and the U.S. where claimants had reasons to organize collectively. The settlement process in Brazil was more prone to conflict because agriculture required fewer collective activities and as a result heterogeneous claimants resorted to periodic violent self-enforcement. In all three cases the movement from de facto to de jure property rights led to potential or actual conflict because of insufficient government enforcement.