The evolution of property rights: The strange case of Iceland’s health records

In her path-breaking work, Elinor Ostrom provides theoretical and empirical evidence suggesting that individuals often overcome the problem of collective action and arrange privately for the provision and allocation of public goods, including informal property rights. Ostrom has also found that local experimentation and self-governance often produce more effective results than rulemaking by the state. In his Coase Theorem, Ronald Coase arrives at a somewhat similar conclusion. Ostrom and Coase both recognize that high transaction costs can block private rule making. The new literature on institutions, however, has jettisoned the model of a benevolent welfare maximizing state: The state does not as a rule assign the license to create property rights to those who are most likely to provide efficient solutions. Still, private individuals often find various opportunities to supply their own informal rules and governance systems. In this paper, I examine recent evolution of property rights in Iceland’s national health records. My findings a) support the hypothesis that the demand for exclusive and well-defined property rights depends directly on the value of the assets in question; b) show that de facto rights, which are the effective economic property rights, can deviate from the corresponding de jure rights; c) demonstrate the relevance of the Coase-Ostrom insight concerning the role of private ordering; and d) provide evidence that competition between mental models can have a major role in the evolution of property rights

In the woods: darkness at noon or Sunday in the park with Lin?

Commons, Complexity, Useful knowledge, Induction, Institutional policy, Intellectual property,

INSTITUTE OF ECONOMIC STUDIES Evolution of Financial Institutions: Iceland's Path from Repression to Eruption Evolution of Financial Institutions: Iceland's Path from Repression to Eruption

Abstract Iceland is the smallest sovereign state in the world that has an independent monetary policy. In the last 120 years the country has experienced four types of financial institutions: barter, an immature liberal system, a repressed financial market, and a full-fledged liberal market. The examination of institutional change in Iceland in the financial area provides interesting empirical evidence on the role of alternative financial institutions in economic development. The financial liberalization in the 1990s has generated a startling internationalization of Icelandic businesses

Smectite quantification in hydrothermally altered volcanic rocks

International audienceIn volcanic environments, the presence of smectite may indicate recent hydrothermal circulations. Smectite is also responsible for enhanced rock electrical conductivity, as well as mechanical weakening. Therefore, 1 quantifying smectite is important in geothermal exploration. Smectite identification requires X-ray diffraction (XRD) but quantification based on XRD is time-consuming and not always accurate. In the present study, we investigate the use of an optimized unbuffered Cation Exchange Capacity (CEC) measurement, by back-titration of the Coppertriethylenetetramine(II) "Cu-trien" molecule, to quantify the smectite content of altered volcanic rock samples. We establish that a satisfying trade-off between the instrument uncertainty and an independant systematic error is theoretically reached for a fraction of reactants consumed of about 30% at the end of the exchange reaction. We suggest a modification to classical protocols to fall in that range. Finally, we show that optimized CEC measurements by Cu-trien are a direct measure of the smectite weight fraction in altered volcanic samples, with an average CEC of pure smectite of 90 ± 5 meq/100g