Minimum Wage, Public Employment Offices and Unemployment Compensation: John R. Commons's View

In accordance with the concept of transaction as introduced by John R. Commons we willinvestigate the contractual and market remedies which labour law may implement to make ‘order’ in theemployer-employee relationship.In this view, one of the most important contractual remedies is the minimum wage. It demarks an inalienabledefault point under which wage bargaining can not drop. Unlike, employability represents the mostimportant concept in order to take into explicit account market dynamics. In this respect, employmentcompensation and public employment offices, involving parties’ outside options, are widely treated.Lastly, we will prove that these two kinds of legal intervention (contract and market regarding) are derivedfrom Commons distinction between liberty and freedom.John R. Commons, employability, labour law and economics

Positional goods and Robert Lee Hale's legal economics

The legal realist Robert Lee Hale offered a definition of freedom as a zero-sum game: each volitional freedom implies some degree of coercion over other people's freedom, and at the same time one's freedom is subject to some degree of control and coercion by others. The objective of our work is to develop this idea along with the theory of positional goods. This allows us to illustrate the externalities deriving from the ‘consumption' of freedom and detail the role of the lawmaker in accordance with the Halean contributio

Beyond Legal Relations Wesley Newcomb Hohfeld’s Influence on American Institutionalism

This paper documents Hohfeld’s influence on interwar American institutionalism. We will mainly focus on three leading figures of the movement: John Rogers Commons, Robert Lee Hale, and John Maurice Clark. They regarded Hohfeld’s contribution on jural relations as a preliminary step toward the understanding of the adversarial nature of legal rights. Albeit with substantial differences in style, method and emphasis, Hohfeld’s schema provided a powerful analytical and rhetorical tool for their analysis.

On the (political) origin of "corporate governance" species

Although economies, business practices, and living standards have converged since WWII, corporate structures continue to differ among the advanced economies of the world. Looking at the diversity of corporate structures of large-sized firms around the world (and over time) would fascinate Charles Darwin. This work develops a critical review of the literature on political determinants of corporate governance through the Darwinian theory (including some Lamarckian aspects). As Darwin, in his work "On the Origin of Species", explicates the diversity of species of tortoises, finches, and iguanas of the Galapagos Islands, so Darwinism may contribute in understanding the origin and the persistence of corporate diversity. In particular, this article takes into account politics-driven variations, their inheritances, and the subsequent selection of advantageous "corporate" attributes

Learning from the Swiss corporate governance exception

The Swiss economy represents an exception to the legal origin theory (e.g., Roe (2006)). Although Switzerland is a country belonging to the civil law family, many of its public companies have diffused corporate ownership, as do those in common law countries. This paper maintains that the Swiss exception relies on the complementarity between corporate ownership and policies addressing employment protection and innovation. The Swiss case presents two lessons: first, the current corporate governance is the result of a long and composite path in which politics plays a pivotal role; second, the institutional differences and similarities across countries, which one would try to explain along with the legal origin theory, can derive diversely from additional politics-based accounts, such as those referring to policies on employment protection and innovation

An analysis of how 2002 judicial reorganisation has impacted on the performance of the First Instance Courts (Preture) in Ticino

With data from 2001 to 2010 of the First Instance Courts of the Canton of Ticino, Switzerland, this paper examines the impact of Legge sull’istituzione della Pretura penale e della funzione di sostituto Procuratore pubblico (2002), which meant to improve Cantonal court performance by decreasing penal workload. Our results suggest that such law has posed non-positive effects on judicial length and courts’ performance. This work may furnish moreover some intuition about the expected impact of Legge sull’organizzazione giudiziaria (2006), which has adapted cantonal judicial system to new Swiss Civil Procedure Code, as well policy proposals for the cantonal programme known as Giustizia 2018

Does brick size matter? Albert G. Keller on another QWERTY story

In his seminal ‘‘Clio and the Economics of Qwerty’’, Paul David indicates Thorstein Veblen’s famous discussion of the British system of coal rail haulage as an intellectual antecedent to the idea of lock in. This note documents how Albert G. Keller, a Yale sociologist contemporary of Veblen, had presented a similar argument in connection to the establishment of a brick tax in England and its effects on the size of bricks. Like Veblen, Keller used this illustration to emphasize the inertia exercised by certain institutional conditions

Costly institutions as substitutes: novelty and limits of the Coasian approach

One of the main contributions of Ronald H. Coase was to demonstrate how mainstream economics was based on a contradictory amalgam of costly physical inputs and free institutional resources, and to gave origin the economics of institutions: each institution is a mode of allocation and organization of economic resources that is to be investigated. In particular, none of the institutions (including the market) is a free lunch. The Coasian approach regards institutions as costly substitutes and provides a fundamental starting point for comparative institutional analysis. However, Coase neglected two issues deriving from the observation that institutions are not cost-free. First, when institutions are costly, one should not only consider their possible substitutes but also how complementary institutions affect their costs, as well as the costs of the possible institutional substitutes. Secondly, the economic analysis should also take into account that the transition from one institutional setup to another cannot occur in costless meta-institutions. The initial conditions may substantially affect the final institutional arrangements. Both the novelty of Coase’s approach and its limits were grossly undervalued. The costly institutions assumption requires a view of economics as a historical discipline

Corporate governance and its political economy

To fully understand governance and authority in the large corporation, one must attend to politics. Because basic dimensions of corporate organization can affect the interests of voters, because powerful concentrated interest groups seek particular outcomes that deeply affect large corporations, because those deploying corporate and financial resources from within the corporation to buttress their own interests can affect policy outcomes, and because the structure of some democratic governments fits better with some corporate ownership structures than with others, politics can and does determine core structures of the large corporation. In this review piece for the Oxford Handbook on Corporate Governance, we analyze the generalities and then look at core aspects of corporate governance that have been, and continue to be, politically influenced and sometimes politically driven: first, the historically fragmented ownership of capital in the United States; second, the postwar power of labor in Europe and its corporate impact; and, third, the ongoing power of the American executive and the American board as due in part to their influence on political and legal outcomes

La posizionalità come presupposto della relazionalità; e viceversa

Both relational and positional goods are based upon an idea of joint consumption - thought with opposite signs. In both cases, agents are not self-regarded, but their consumption choices are other-regarded. Moreover, relational good lies on identity of its consumers. It implies a certain degree of positionality within the consumption of relational goods. Analogously, except for two-agent context, each positional good has a relational component. What emerges is a complex structure of economic outcomes based on both relational and positional motives.Relational Good, Positional Good.