Restricting Access to Books on the Internet: Some Unanticipated Effects of U.S. Copyright Legislation

One manifestation of the trend towards the strengthening of copyright protection that has been noticeable during the past two decades is the secular extension of the potential duration during which access to copyrightable materials remains legally restricted. Those restrictions carry clear implications for the current and prospective costs to readers seeking “on-line” availability of the affected content in digital form, via the Internet. This paper undertakes to quantify one aspect of these developments by providing readily understandable measures of the restrictive consequences of the successive modifications that were made in U.S. copyright laws during the second half of the twentieth century. Specifically, we present estimates of the past, present, and future number of copyrighted books belonging to different publication-date “cohorts” whose entry into the public domain (and consequent accessibility in scanned on-line form) will thereby have been postponed. In some instances these deferrals of access due to legislative extensions of the duration of copyright protection are found to reach surprisingly far into the future, and to arise from the effects of interactions among the successive changes in the law that generally have gone unnoticed.copyright legistlation, Internet, digital books

Review of \u3cem\u3eThe Promise and Peril of Credit: What a Forgotten Legend about Jews and Finance Tells Us about the Making of European Commercial Society\u3c/em\u3e

A review of The Promise and Peril of Credit: What a Forgotten Legend about Jews and Finance Tells Us about the Making of European Commercial Society, by Francesca Trivellato, published by Princeton University Press

Review of \u3cem\u3eReligion and the Rise of Capitalism\u3c/em\u3e

A review of Religion and the Rise of Capitalism by Benjamin M. Friedma

Institutions, the Rise of Commerce and the Persistence of Laws: Interest Restrictions in Islam and Christianity

Why was economic development retarded in the Middle East relative to Western Europe, despite the Middle East being far ahead for centuries? A theoretical model inspired and substantiated by the history of interest restrictions suggests that this outcome emanates in part from the greater degree to which early Islamic political authorities derived legitimacy from religious authorities. This entailed a feedback mechanism in Europe in which the rise of commerce led to the relaxation of interest restrictions while also diminishing the Church\u27s ability to legitimise political authorities. These interactions did not occur in the Islamic world despite equally amenable economic conditions

\u3cem\u3eCoping with Defeat: Sunni Islam, Roman Catholicism, and the Modern State\u3c/em\u3e. Jonathan Laurence (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2021). Pp. 606. $35.00 paper. ISBN: 9780691172125

A book review of Coping with Defeat: Sunni Islam, Roman Catholicism, and the Modern State by Jonathan Lawrence

Printing and Protestants: An Empirical Test Of the Role Of Printing In the Reformation

The causes of the Protestant Reformation have long been debated. This paper seeks to revive and econometrically test the theory that the spread of the Reformation is linked to the spread of the printing press. I test this theory by analyzing data on the spread of the press and the Reformation at the city level. An econometric analysis that instruments for omitted variable bias with a city\u27s distance from Mainz, the birthplace of printing, suggests that cities with at least one printing press by 1500 were at minimum 29 percentage points more likely to be Protestant by 1600

Review of \u3cem\u3eIslam Instrumentalized: Religion and Politics in Historical Perspective\u3c/em\u3e

A review of Jean-Philippe Platteau\u27s Islam Instrumentalized: Religion and Politics in Historical Perspective

Centralized Institutions and Cascades

Why do sudden and massive social, economic, and political changes occur when and where they do? Are there institutional preconditions that encourage such changes when present and discourage such changes when absent? I employ a general model which suggests that cascades which induce massive equilibrium changes are more likely to occur in regimes with centralized coercive power, defined as the ability to impose more than one type of sanction (economic, legal, political, social, or religious). Centralized authorities are better able to suppress subversive actions when external shocks are small, as citizens have little incentive to incur numerous types of sanctions. However, citizens are also more likely to lie about their internal preferences in such regimes (e.g., falsely declare loyalty to an oppressive government), entailing that larger shocks are more likely to trigger a cascade to a vastly different equilibrium. The model is applied to the severity of protests that followed austerity measures taken in developing nations since the 1970s

Social Insurance, Commitment, and the Origin of Law: Interest Bans in Early Christianity

Despite the historical importance of ideology-based, economically inhibitive laws, we know little about the economic factors underlying their origin. This paper accounts for the historical emergence of one such law: the Christian ban on taking interest--a doctrine that shaped the evolution of numerous financial contracts and related organizational forms. A game-theoretic analysis and historical evidence suggest that the Church\u27s commitment to providing social insurance for its poorest constituents encouraged risky borrowing, which the Church attempted to limit by banning interest. The analysis highlights the applicability of the rational choice framework to seemingly irrational actions and laws, the role of nonmonetary sanctions in circumventing commitment problems, and the importance of economic forces vis-à-vis ideology

Introduction to the Special Issue on the Economics of Religion

The economics and political science of religion have blossomed into full-fledged fields in the last decade and a half. What was once a field on the far outskirts of economics and political science now regularly publishes in its top journals (see Figure 1).1 By 1998, the field was large enough for Iannaccone (1998) to write a survey of the shape of the field. The field was very much at its infancy at that time, and most of the best work was done by sociologists and/or published in sociology journals. This has changed significantly in the 22 years since Iannaccone\u27s survey. While the sociology of religion is still thriving as a field, the economics and political science of religion has become a distinct and impactful field of its own. Institutionally, this change is mirrored by the growth of the ASREC (Association for the Study of Religion, Economics, and Culture) annual meetings. ASREC, founded by Iannaccone in 2000, met for a few sessions at the annual meetings of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion until 2009. Since then, it has held its own annual meetings, and it is mainly attended by economists and political scientists. The meetings have anywhere between 50 and 100 papers presented, most of top quality. Indeed, most of the data points in Figure 1 were presented at ASREC