European Journal of Law and Economics最新文献

Abstract

This study focuses on the analysis of cryptocurrency regulatory developments in Europe. The aim is to review national crypto-legislation in Europe and the EU's latest initiative to create designated regulatory instruments for the crypto-economy. This study assessed whether the European Union's Regulation on Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) would have the intended effect. Drawing on the results of a survey of crypto experts from five European countries, this study evaluated the effectiveness of current regulation across Europe and how it can be improved to reduce financial crimes. The findings show that a unified national legal framework for regulating transactions with crypto assets does not exist in European countries. Current crypto regulations are dictated by anti-money laundering recommendations. This study provides suggestions for improving MiCA regulation. The article offers recommendations for an international regulatory standard for crypto assets and insights for increasing efficiency in regulating DeFi, NFTs, and smart contracts.

This paper studies the efficient definition of product defects for AI systems with autonomous capabilities. It argues that defining defects in product liability law is central to distributing responsibility between producers and users. The paper proposes aligning the standard for defect with the relative control over and awareness of product risk possessed by the producer and the user. AI systems disrupt the traditional balance of control and risk awareness between users and producers. The paper provides suggestions for defining AI product defects in a way that promotes an efficient allocation of liability in AI-related accidents. It assesses whether the recent EU policy proposal on product liability aligns with this approach.

Judicial efficiency has been widely identified as a factor that has an impact on credit markets and firms’ financial decisions. In this paper, we study the relationship between judicial efficiency and trade credit granted by firms to their customers, as well as how the judicial system influences the proportion of those credits that are deemed ‘doubtful’. We test our assumption by analysing a sample of 1526 listed, ‘non-financial’ firms located in countries in the eurozone, during the period 2011–2021. The proxies of judicial efficiency are the length of judicial proceedings and rule of law, obtained from the World Bank’s ‘Doing Business’ and the World Bank Governance Indicators (WGI) databases, respectively. The empirical findings confirm our hypotheses that efficient justice allows for increased supplier confidence when extending financing to their customers and reduces doubtful trade credit.

Abstract

Property rights are secure, and violence over land can be attenuated when the treatment and delineation of the property are consistent, stable, and interpreted similarly by each party. In the absence of a mutual understanding of property rights, land-use stability becomes strained as the area of contested land between two rival parties expands—when one party (or group) is perceived as asymmetrically and rapidly accumulating land at another’s expense. While relations between Algonquian tribes and English settlers were generally peaceful in the first half of the 17th century, subsequent colonial growth accelerated and lead to violent conflict. The latter half of the 17th century experienced some of the most devastating conflicts during early colonial American development—beginning with Pequot’s War, peaking during King Philip’s War, and ending with a European proxy war in North America during King William’s War. Using probate data for 72 settlements in New England to measure the growth of farmers as a proxy for colonial territorial growth, I find a general pattern that English settlements with higher rates of population and territorial growth experienced more violent conflict during King Philip’s War. The same relationship between territorial growth and violent conflict was not as strong for wars that preceded and succeeded King Philip’s War.

With the advance of smart IoT devices (Internet of Things) the amount of valuable data will increase dramatically. With its recently enacted Data Act (DA) the EU introduces new data access and sharing rights for the users of IoT devices. This article analyzes how the DA will change the bundle of rights on non-personal IoT data regarding who can control, access, use, share, and monetize this data. In a first step, we apply the property rights theory (esp. the approach of Barzel) for explaining the status quo of IoT data governance. Here the manufacturers can get through the technical design of their IoT devices exclusive de facto control over IoT data ("capture" of data). In a second step, we analyze how the DA changes this de facto bundle of rights in order to unlock more IoT data for innovation, competition, and empowerment of users. Since the DA is not very clear and partly contradictory, three different concepts for the design of this bundle of rights are analyzed and compared: A data holder-centric IP-like concept, a user-centric concept, and the concept of co-generated data. The article analyzes all three concepts from an economic perspective including relevant market failures regarding IoT data in B2B and B2C contexts. For achieving the objectives of the DA, especially regarding unlocking of data for innovation, bundles of rights should be chosen which reject notions of exclusivity and enable broad access and sharing of IoT data. The enacted Data Act, which still clings too much to the exclusivity of data and includes too many hurdles for data sharing, cannot be expected to contribute much to achieving these objectives.

This essay examines, from a legal and economic perspective, the judicial response to rent controls in the EU focusing on three courts that operate at the fundamental rights and constitutional level: the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), the German Federal Constitutional Court (BVerfGE), and the Italian Constitutional Court. Based on an analysis of a sample of judicial decisions rendered over time, a convergent trend emerges: these Courts have recognized and effectively protected the landlord's property rights against rent controls that were disproportionate and could not ensure a reasonable return on investment. This trend is prominent in the jurisprudence of the ECtHR: the Strasbourg Court has contributed to reshaping the distribution of power between tenants and landlords, encouraging the transition of Eastern and Southern European Countries to the common European housing market. In both upholding and striking down rent control measures, judges generally take market value and the comparative reference price as the preferred benchmarks for fair rent price. A consumption-based and financial characterization of housing, coupled with the fundamental right to derive economic benefits as core elements of the right to property, underpin the legal reasoning of the three Courts.

We study the incentives and welfare properties of industrial data sharing taking into account the data (economy) readiness of companies. We differentiate between two regulatory settings. First, there is no compulsion for companies to provide data. Companies, which also use the data for other corporate purposes, decide whether to share their data voluntarily. Second, there is a regulatory requirement on the minimum amount of data to be shared by the data provider. We assume that data sharing affects the data provider’s value of the data. The magnitude and sign of this effect have an impact on the optimal investment level of data generation and overall welfare in the different cases under study. Our results suggest that the implementation of a data-sharing policy has ambiguous welfare properties. It has positive welfare properties if (a) the data receiving firm does not pay too much for the data, (b) the data receiving firm benefits enough from the data provider’s data generating effort, and (c) the intensified competition due to data sharing is not too harmful to the data provider. In contrast, it will always have negative welfare properties if the data provider’s minimum amount of data to be shared under the policy is prohibitively high such that no data is created in the first place. Our results also suggest that a positive effect of data sharing on the data-generating company’s value of the data and its data economy readiness positively affect the incentives to share data. Finally, we find that data sharing under a data-sharing policy leads to a lower data quality if the data economy readiness of the data-generating company is too low.

Using the classification system from the European Patent Office (EPO), we identify almost 600,000 patent applications for fourth industrial revolution technologies from 1986 to 2015. We contribute to the economic literature by seeking to answer two research questions: (1) What is the effect of legal breath (and other indicators) on the quality of innovations in the fourth industrial revolution, (2) How does the IP culture (utilitarism vs. natural law) explain these differences? We find that the legal breadth of a patent positively affects the quality of innovations in the fourth industrial revolution. Interestingly, this impact of legal breadth may be driven by historical path dependencies and ways in which the two philosophical schools (utilitarism vs. natural law) have shaped the patent system in Anglo-Saxon countries versus continental Europe.

This paper revisits Coase’s ideas on property rights in a scenario where the law allows the establishment of mandatory limits - caps- to specific harmful effects of economic activity such as air pollution or traffic congestion. We propose a general equilibrium model with a cap-and-trade mechanism where agents suffering the harm share a portfolio of Coasian rights designed according to the caps. Equilibrium allocations must comply with the cap, reducing polluting emissions or switching from private to public transport. In addition, the monetary transfers that result from the sale of rights to polluters yield compensation to the harmed population, increasing the non-polluters income.

We study whether it is socially desirable to hold a monopolistic firm liable for the harm its potentially judgment-proof consumers inflict on third parties. Consumers’ judgment-proofness limits potential product differentiation by pooling different consumer types with uniform liability exposure. The firm’s safety choices are distorted in both regimes under consideration: consumer-only liability and residual-manufacturer liability. We find that residual-manufacturer liability dominates consumer-only liability if the monopolistic firm can observe consumers’ types, or if consumers’ types are not observable but heterogeneity stems only from their asset levels. However, if the monopolistic firm cannot observe consumers’ types and heterogeneity stems from their harm levels, it is more difficult to make a case for residual-manufacturer liability.