Ugo Pagano

Ugo Pagano
University of Siena | UNISI · Department of Economics and Statistics

PhD Cambridge

About

107
Publications
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1,587
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January 1990 - present
University of Siena
Position
  • Professor (Full)

Publications

Publications (107)
Article
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The last three decades have witnessed the emergence of a new species of capitalism. In spite of marked differences between its national varieties, a common characteristic of this species can be found in the global monopolisation of knowledge. This monopolisation involves hierarchical relations among firms and between capital and labour, because the...
Article
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Humans and social insects are located at extreme points of the set of possible evolutionary paths. However, they share a complex division of labour and comprise a large proportion of the earth's biomass. These observations prompt two questions: If there are evident evolutionary advantages of cooperation and specialisation, why have only few species...
Chapter
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The paper examines different types of financial organization in a framework of incomplete law, under which the rights and the duties of the individuals are not completely specified. It focuses on the relationship between finance and specificity arguing that, while financial structure influences the degree of specificity of the assets, the degree of...
Article
In this paper, we argue that the relationship between shareholder conflicts and corporate assets can generate multiple equilibrium configurations that can be helpful to understand how corporate governance systems may change under different historical models of capitalism. These relationships can be modeled as 'meta-complementarities' existing among...
Preprint
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Negli anni recenti si è molto modificata la “curva del sorriso” che descrive la catena del valore. Si è svalorizzata l’incidenza delle parti attribuite ai processi produttivi materiali rispetto alle parti che si riferiscono ai diritti di proprietà intellettuali. Questa trasformazione del capitalismo moderno ha portato a una monopolizzazione della c...
Article
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Cambridge Core - Financial Law - The Political Economy of Financial Regulation - edited by Emilios Avgouleas
Preprint
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Il capitalismo italiano si presenta nel dopoguerra con un ampio settore di grandi imprese pubbliche che garantiscono una separazione estrema fra proprietà e controllo e altrimenti con imprese, anche di grande dimensione, solo a conduzione familiare. Diversamente da altri paesi capitalistici, è assente nel settore privato del capitalismo italiano un...
Article
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Este artículo revisa una rama reciente de investigación que subraya que las actuales instituciones de la economía del conocimiento ponen en peligro la promesa de crecimiento y prosperidad que se atribuye al mayor uso del conocimiento. La privatización excesiva del conocimiento genera círculos viciosos y virtuosos de acumulación de propiedad intelec...
Article
Research policies reflect to a great extent a view of the social utility of science as resting in its role as facilitator of economic growth. However, the associated measures - the re-orientation of universities and Public Research Organizations towards serving the training and research support needs of the economy and the pervasive recourse to pat...
Working Paper
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Article
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ABSTRACT Gli ultimi decenni hanno visto una estesa privatizzazione della conoscenza che è diventata una delle componenti più importanti del capitale delle imprese. Le rendite monopolistiche della conoscenza privata hanno fatto crescere i profitti ma hanno avuto effetti negativi sulla crescita economica e sulla distribuzione della ricchezza. Nuove e...
Chapter
Institutional complementarity refers to situation of interdependence among institutions. The present article presents a formal representation of institutional complementarity and discusses several economic applications of this concept.
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Article
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The purpose of this short reply is to consider the issue of the evolution of the exceptional human intellectual capabilities which has been the focus of the majority of the comments to my article “love, war and culture: an institutional approach to human evolution” all published in the April 2013 of the Journal of Bioeconomics. All the contribution...
Article
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 give origin to the economics of institutions: each institution is a mode of allocation and organization of economic resources that is to be investigated....
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Article
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The two major contributions of Ronald Coase, written at distant points of his long life, have been often interpreted as different and, somehow, contradicting views of the merits of the market mechanism. We argue that the underlying point of the two articles is the same and it can be summarized by the statement that no institution is a free lunch. W...
Article
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Love, War and Culture have all played an important role in the evolution of human institutions and they have been characterized by complex relationships. War can select unselfish groups ready to sacrifice themselves for the love of their communities that they recognize to be culturally different from the others. At the same time, horizontal cultura...
Article
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The Evolution of the Modern Corporate Structure has been one of the most influential chapters of The Modern Corporation & Private Property. But Berle and Means’s superb analysis is framed in the American context and cannot be easily generalized to other experiences. Their corporate model arose in a democratic country where “production engineers” co...
Article
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In biology, the laws that regulate the structuring and change of complex organisms, characterised by interlocking complementarities, are different from those that shape the evolution of simple organisms. Only the latter share mechanisms of competitive selection of the fittest analogous to those envisaged by the standard neoclassical model in econom...
Book
Col progetto "Crescere al futuro" si era esplorata la leadership collegata alla continuità di impresa, in un quadro impegnativo di attraversamento della crisi. Quest'anno si è voluto porre l'accento sul tema della leadership collegata alla necessaria crescita dei "sistemi di relazione" attraverso cui l'azienda opera. Una leadership orientata alla g...
Article
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Posner considers purposeful organisations. Legal persons are fictitious non-mortal species whose evolution has played a major role in economic development. In what sense can they be said to have a purpose? Thanks to several important mutations, the status of legal persons was transferred from public bodies to business corporations. This evolutionar...
Article
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Legal positions are linked together by strong institutional complementarities. Legal positions satisfy conditions of institutional complementarity that are stronger than the usual ones. The equilibrium conditions, which they define, may be violated ex-ante but must hold ex-post as accounting identities. The glue of social scarcity, typical of posit...
Article
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Like land before the industrial revolution, much knowledge is being enclosed in private hands. These enclosures have become a major factor in specialization among firms and among countries: both are forced to specialize in the fields that are not restricted by the enclosures of the others. This forced specialization is highly asymmetric and involve...
Article
Some of the roots underlying the recent crisis may be found in the global convergence towards a model characterized by strong property rights and an extremely limited role attributed to "open science". The modern economy has increasingly moved from an open science - open markets model toward a closed science - closed markets model. Paradoxically, w...
Article
The firm can be seen as a centralization of market transactions and as a decentralization of a public ordering which allows the management of joint liabilities. The paper advances the view that the main reason for the firm’s existence is the unification and the internalization of liabilities. From this perspective, Coase's and Fuller's contribution...
Article
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This paper advances the hypothesis that some of the roots of the present crisis are to be found in the present institutions of the knowledge economy. While protectionism is seen as a possible dangerous outcome of the crisis, the extent of protectionism inherent to the strengthening and globalisation of intellectual property rights (IPRs) associated...
Article
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In the OECD countries, there exists a negative cross-country correlation between an economy's degree of employment protection and its degree of corporate ownership dispersion. One explanation is that employees’ political rights influence corporate governance: systems characterized by strong employees’ rights tend to be balanced by strong and concen...
Chapter
The case for law and economics: beyond disciplinary nirvanas? In recent years, as Mercuro and Medema (1997, pp ix–x) point out, “Law and Economics has developed from a small and rather esoteric branch within economics and law, to a substantial movement that has helped to both redefine the study of law and expose economics to the important implicati...
Conference Paper
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Una versión anterior de este trabajo fue presentada en la reunión X JAFEE, que tuvo lugar en Kyoto en marzo del 2007. Estoy muy agradecido por todos los comentarios provechosos que recibí durante el seminario y los muy estimulantes diez días que pasé en Japón en dicha ocasión. Durante mi visita también tuve la oportunidad de presentar mi trabajo de...
Article
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Since the time of Darwin and Wallace, the origin of the human brain has been a controversial issue in evolutionary biology. The development of the human brain has been a matter of dispute between those who attribute it to the forces of natural selection and those who emphasize the role of sexual selection. Building on Darwin’s original insights, i...
Chapter
Cultural diversity creates obvious problems for the institution and operation of markets. It substantially reduces the liquidity of resources and raises major obstacles against their mobility. It also encourages identification with particular groups, which restricts economic solidarity and often impedes forms of reciprocal insurance outside the bou...
Article
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National economies used to be characterised by cultural standardisation and social protection. Globalisation pushes cultural standardisation beyond the boundaries of national states and induces a global dilution of the standards of social protection. At the same time, if national economies specialise according to their comparative institutional adv...
Article
New Institutional Theory has pointed out mechanisms by which technology can influence property rights and organizational forms. We argue that the argument can be integrated and enriched by using also the opposite argument: property rights and technology can also influence technology. We develop an "organizational equilibria" framework and we show t...
Article
The paper reviews theories of information technology adoption and organizational form and applies them to an empirical analysis of firm choices and characteristics in four transition economies: Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania, and Slovakia. We argue that two major structural changes have occurred, one concerning technology and another concerning f...
Article
According to Mark Roe, politics influences corporate governance. The separation between control and ownership is only possible when there is a low “degree of social democracy”. By contrast, systems, characterised by strong employees’ rights, are necessarily balanced by strong and concentrated owners. However, causation may also run in the opposite...
Article
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In the New Property Rights model ownership of assets should be assigned to the most capable agents. While, in a world of incomplete contracts, the application of the model to IPRs provides insights on the nature of their second best allocation, suggesting a direction of causation going from technology to property rights, also the opposite direction...
Article
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In the New Property Rights model ownership of assets should be assigned to the most capable agents. While, in a world of incomplete contracts, the application of the model to IPRs provides insights on the nature of their second best allocation, also the opposite direction of causation may arise: owners of IPRs tend to develop more capabilities in t...
Article
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According to the “Neoclassical” approach, stemming from the Tiebout model, the main advantage of federalism lies in the possibility that individuals with similar tastes, including those related to risk-aversion and the provision of public goods, can cluster in the same jurisdictions. The starting point of this paper is a criticism of this approach....
Article
We explore cultural aspects of globalization and provide a model to illuminate some possible effects of globalization on the politics of redistribution within nations. The argument of the paper is as follows. Globalization is an extension of nationalism (not its antithesis) with regard to some aspects of culture and economic structure: it promotes...
Article
Full-text available
Legal positions (such as rights, duties, liberties, powers, liabilities and immunities) are linked together by strong institutional complementarities that differ from the usual institutional complementarities that have been recently considered in economic literature. Legal positions not only satisfy the usual conditions of institutional complementa...
Article
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In this paper, we show how in Gellner we can find a stimulating analysis of the institutional equilibria that characterise agrarian and industrial society and the conditions that make possible institutional change from one equilibrium to another. This allows a convincing account of the reasons why some countries industrialised before others and why...
Article
L\'economia delle istituzioni e le istituzioni della scienza economica Some basic tools of modern approach to the “Economic of Institutions” are shown to be useful to develop an “Economics of Economics” that may throw some light on the nature of the “Institutions of Economics”. The “over-supply” of mathematics, that characterizes modern Economics,...
Article
For a long time family capitalism has been considered to be one of the distinguishing characteristics of the Italian economy. In Italy also large business organizations rely very often on this form of corporate governance. This paper examines both the actual institutional shocks and the missed opportunity for institutional shocks that have diversif...
Article
Full-text available
Legal positions (such as rights, duties, liberties, powers, liabilities and immunities) are linked together by strong institutional complementarities differing from the usual institutional complementarities that have been recently considered by the Economic Literature. Legal positions do not only satisfy the usual conditions of institutional comple...
Article
Some basic tools of modern approach to the "Economic of Institutions" are shown to be useful to develop an "Economics of Economics" that may throw some light on the nature of the "Institutions of Economics". The "over-supply" of mathematics, that characterizes modern Economics, can be explained by the value that mathematical techniques have as scre...
Article
It is often claimed that the recent advances in information technology have some definitive organizational implications for advanced capitalist economies and, more specifically, to imply a convergence towards a single model of a more "decentralized" market economy. This paper challenges this view on two grounds. In the first place, we observe that...
Article
The process of creative destruction which characterizes market economies makes specific investments in human capital particularly risky. Therefore, these economies are characterized by a painful trade-off between the advantages of market flexibility and those of specialization. In this paper, we propose a joint analysis of two important policies th...
Article
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In a world of bounded rationality the ability to economize on bounded rationality must also be severely bounded and "economizing behavior" cannot be mechanically extended to bounded rationality without contradicting the idea of bounded rationality itself. Thus, bounded rationality does necessarily involve some departure from the economizing behavio...
Article
The paper argues that some of the limitations and problems examined by Darwin and modern biologists in relation to the working of natural selection in the case of speciation may be one aspect of more general rules which have some counterpart in the competitive selection of organisational species in capitalist economic development. In biology the la...
Article
In the New Property Rights approach the degree of incompleteness of markets is taken independently of the cost of the public ordering and of their efficiency relatively to private orderings. In this approach “public markets,” similarly to a Swiss cheese, are either assumed to be nonexistent empty holes (because of infinite third party verification...
Article
After the first section, introducing some typical problems of family capitalism, the following three sections of the paper consider the ambiguity of the legal framework defining the modern corporation, the two way relation between technology and property rights and the different mechanisms by which the control of the firms can be transferred to new...
Article
In this paper we try to explore the complex issues related to the transition economy of Japan after the end of the second world war by applying the concept of "organisational equilibria to a comparative historical analysis of the japanese model.
Article
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The purpose of this paper is to argue tha some of the limitation and problems that arise with the working of natural selection in the case of speciation may be one aspect of the more general rule of structure and change and may have some counterpart on the competitive selection of organisational species in human history.
Article
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The argument developed supports policies of re-distribution of assets also in cases where the existing technological and information conditions may seem to imply the contrary.
Article
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The paper first considers a number of theoretical aspects surrounding the ambiguity of the legal framework defining the modern corporation and the two-way relation between technology and property rights. It then looks at the evolution of corporate governance through time, paying particular attention to the different roles played by the American occ...
Article
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En biología evolutiva, la competencia entre miembros de la misma especie favorece la aparición y la selección de mutaciones graduales "eficientes". Al mismo tiempo, esa competencia puede inhibir la formación de nuevas especies que requieren un conjunto de mutaciones complementarias. En esos casos, que implican que los híbridos entre especies antigu...
Article
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The New Institutional economists assume that technology determines property rights, whilst radical economists assume that causality runs in the opposite direction. This paper introduces the concept of "organisational equilibrium" to show how these two approaches can be combined. In such an equilibrium,existing property rights are the most efficient...
Article
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For a given technology, the ownership of the firm goes to the high agency cost factors that can save the most on agency costs when they own the organization. At the same time, owning factors choose a technology which economizes on the use of other high agency cost factors. Thus, ownership and technology define self-reinforcing multiple organization...
Article
The explanation of the causes for the existence of the firm relies on market transaction costs, such as monitoring and enforcement costs, which can be observed in an equilibrium situation. The purpose of this paper is to show that ‘disequilibrium transaction costs’ can be even more important than ‘equilibrium transaction costs’ in explaining the na...
Article
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In order to answer this question we start by considering the role of Nations in allowing that division of labour that is associated with market economies. Even if rent-seeking activities may cause inefficient institutional equilibria, we argue that nationalism may be included among the possible causes of the accumulation of wealth. We also consider...
Article
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We argue that New Institutional theory and Radical theory can be integrated into a single theoretical framework where the characteristics of technology and property rights influence each other generating multiple, and institutionally stable, Organizational Equilibria. This framework can be applied to the analysis of the varieties of capitalism, whi...

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