Berkeley Program in Law and Economics

La LEC 2000 apuesta por facilitar la ejecución provisional de las resoluciones judiciales, a pesar de las críticas de la doctrina a la institución. En el presente estudio se investiga bajo qué circunstancias es deseable favorecer la ejecución provisional y se determina si en la actualidad cabe esperar que la ejecución provisional tenga más beneficios que costes.

The widespread ennoblement of the Spanish bourgeoisie in the sixteenth century has been traditionally considered one of the main causes of Iberian decline. I document and quantify the surge in ennoblement through a new time series of nobility cases preserved in the Archive of the Royal Chancery Court of Valladolid and use the insights provided by lawsuits from several localities to model the rent seeking mechanisms at work in a game theoretical framework. I then validate the game against the data and use it to draw inferences about the unobserved redistributive activity in local politics. Contrary to established scholarship, I find that: 1) the tax exemptions granted to nobles cannot alone explain the flight to privilege, since ennoblement was more costly than the present value of the future tax benefits; 2) the central motivation behind ennoblement was to gain control of local governments and acquire decision-making power over common resources; 3) while ennoblement reflected a high level of redistributive activity, there is no evidence in the archival record linking it to the stagnation and decline of Spain.

The paper consists of two parts: a theoretical part followed by a practical part. On the basis of the economic literature concerning environmental law and economic development it is illustrated how criteria can be developed to examine whether specific environmental policy instruments can be used in the context of developing countries. Next these hypotheses are applied in a case study of Peru. The starting point for the analysis is the recently established Ministry of the Environment and its implications. Then a recent legislative proposal for the establishment and management of municipal and regional protected areas shall be analysed In the conclusions based on the case-study some ideas shall be presented on how to minimize the disturbing effects of external players in the form of lobbying or corruption in law-making and administration.

This article discusses two opposed hypotheses to predict the behavior of judges when they have to decide a claim between parties with asymmetrical eco- nomic and political power. The .rst, which has broad acceptance among policy makers in Brazil, is the jurisdictional uncertainty hypothesis (Arida et al, 2005) that suggests that Brazilian judges tend to favor the weak party in the claim as a form of social justice and redistribution of income in favor of the poor. Glaeser et al (2003) stated the second hypothesis. They suggest that the operation of legal, political and regulatory institutions is subverted by the wealthy and politically powerful for their own bene.t, a situation they call King John redistribution. An empirical test was conducted analyzing judicial decisions from 16 Brazilian states, showing that a) judges favor the strongest party, b) a local powerful party.