Kind Of Property Rights Research Articles

Summary: Why is reforming state owned enterprises so difficult?

There are two schools of thought on the reform of Chinese state enterprises that argue either that nothing can be done about their reform or that nothing needs to be done. The former argues that bureaucratic resistance will torpedo reform. The latter argues that state enterprises will disappear naturally as collective and private small firms out-compete them. Neither view is very realistic in the Chinese case. Ultimately China will have to successfully reform state-owned enterprises in order to achieve continued high growth. Reforming these enterprises is difficult, however, because so many different and interrelated changes must be made. For the external environment of state enterprises, there must be fundamental changes in financial markets, the tax system, the legal, regulatory and accounting framework, and the worker welfare system. Internal to the enterprise there must be the creation of some kind of property rights plus a revamping of the internal incentive structure of the enterprise.

Job Property Rights and Job Defections

RECENT interest in the ownership arrangements or types of property rights that exist throughout the world has led economists to theorems which apply to wide classes of behavior. Writers have focussed on the comparative discretionary behavior of managers of resources in government, private not-forprofit institutions, and private for-profit firms,' with differences in behavior being explained by testable, utility-maximization models. The specification of rights to direct resources and bear the consequences, and the costs of enforcing rights are determinants of the constraints that are faced. That is, different kinds of property rights affect the marginal rates of transformation that confront individuals in trading off alternative sources of utility.2 This has yielded testable implications that appear to be borne out by observed differences in the behavior of firms. Two obvious extensions of this analysis would be to (1) the behavior of labor unions (and their leaders) and (2) the behavior of employees where employer discretion in allocating labor resources is narrowed (by law or collective contract). With respect to the latter extension, economists and students of industrial relations have long been interested in many of the legislated and contractual constraints attendant to employment relationships. These constraints are of

U. S. Patent Office Records as Sources for the History of Invention and Technological Property

THE RECORDS of the United States Patent Office remain largely unexplored by historians of technology despite the fact that they represent a tremendous body of original source material for the years 1790 to the present. Part of the explanation for the comparative neglect is the very volume and complexity of the records; yet other Federal records of greater complexity are not so immune to historical research. Aside from the question of the relative youthfulness of the history of technology, two factors are probably responsible for the little use made of the records. For one thing, they constitute the largest and most significant body of Federal central office records of the past century not yet completely in the National Archives.' Split between three administrative entities, the patent records are, in part, intermingled with trade mark documents; the inter-relations of the various series are not always clear; and there are significant gaps and omissions. Second, and most important, the records are uneven in quality or, rather, one kind of record fruitful for a specific type of research will disappoint a scholar with an entirely different problem. What follows is a general account of the Patent Office archives emphasizing the principal research opportunities afforded by each class of records. But before indulging in specifics, it will be necessary to understand certain characteristics of the patent system and its records. A patent is a special kind of property right, a monopoly grant of limited duration for the material version (i. e., device, process, or combination of matter) of an idea. Not all patents are for great inventions, great in terms of originality or of impact on the economy. The subjects of patents range from abstruse developments in atomic physics, electronics, and chemistry to fortune-telling crystal balls, from revolutionary changes to minor adaptations in existing devices. Nor is there any certainty that a patent will even be used. The issuance of a patent