This paper analyzes the intellectual foundations and evolution of the European Journal of Law and Economics (EJLE) over its first thirty years. We first reconstruct the European intellectual traditions underlying law and economics—Enlightenment thought, the German Historical School, ordoliberalism, and comparative institutional analysis—and their role in shaping the journal’s founding mission. We then complement this historical analysis with a comprehensive, data-driven study of all EJLE articles published since 1994. Using topic modeling (BERTopic) and abstract-similarity clustering, we document the journal’s thematic structure, its evolution over time, and changes in authorship, collaboration, and geographic composition. The results highlight both continuity and rebalancing within a methodologically plural and institutionally grounded research agenda.

This Special Issue marks the tenth anniversary of the "economic analysis of litigation" academic journey that began in 2014 in Catania with an international workshop. This event has since become an annual meeting point, held in various European cities and online during the pandemic. Over the past decade the field has grown substantially and the contributions collected in this issue reflect the vitality and the maturity of this research agenda. At the same time they highlight the continuing importance of understanding how litigation and judicial institutions shape economic outcomes.

We investigate how timeliness in enforcing legal contracts affects economic growth across countries. We focus on judicial timeliness as a proxy for courts' performance in a large panel of 169 countries over the 2004-2019 period. We show that, by raising uncertainty and promoting opportunistic behaviors in business transactions, slower courts hinder economic development. The relationship is robust to diverse model specifications and appears stronger for business environments more heavily relying on judiciaries such as economies undergoing rapid growth, countries characterized by low human capital and civil law jurisdictions.

Contents:PART I THEORETICAL ISSUES1. The Past, Present and Future of Comparative Law and EconomicsGiovanni B. Ramello2. Markets, Contracts, and Firms: A Unified Model of Organizational ChoiceThomas J. Miceli3. Law, Social Norms, and Standards: Their Nexus with Government and their Impact on the Economic Performance of Nation States Nicholas Mercuro 4. The Market for Legal Innovation: Law and Economics in Europe and the United States, Nuno Garoupa and Thomas S. Ulen 5. Principles, Tolerance and Institutional TorporEnrico ColombattoPART II SELECTED CASES6. Structure and Style in Comparative Property LawYun-chien Chang and Henry E. Smith 7. A Comparative View of Local Tax and Expenditure Limitations and their ConsequencesFederico Revelli8. Iron Fist in a Velvet Glove? Judicial Behavior in Mixed CourtsValerie P. Hans and Anne Jolivet9. Global Competition Law Convergence: Potential Roles for EconomicsDavid J. Gerber10. The Comparative Law and Economics of Energy MarketsGiuseppe Bellantuono 11. A Comparative Law and Economics Analysis of Damages for Patent InfringementThomas F. Cotter 12. The Comparative Economics of International Intellectual Property AgreementsPeter K. Yu13. Copyright and Negligence as Mirror Models: On Not Mistaking for the Right Hand What the Left Hand is DoingWendy J. Gordon14. The Eurozone Crisis, the Defective Policy Response and the Need for Institutional InnovationEnrico Marelli and Marcello SignorelliPART III EMPIRICAL INVESTIGATIONS15. The Effect of Stakes on Settlement: An Empirical Lesson from TaiwanKuo-Chang Huang16. Comparative Judicial Efficiency: Examining Case Disposition in Five Countries' Courts of Last ResortAnthony Kreis, John Szmer and Robert K. Christensen 17. Copyright Law and the Supply of Creative Work: Evidence from the MoviesIvan P.L. Png and Qiu-hong Wang 18. International Environmental Agreement Effectiveness: A Review of Empirical StudiesKendall A. Houghton and Helen T. Naughton19. The American and the European Market of Human Experimentation, A Comparative Study on Regulation and CompetitivenessAntonella Foddis and Roberto IppolitiIndex

This paper reflects on the evolution and current role of what we define as comparative economics, using the experience of the European Journal of Comparative Economics as a vantage point for observing broader disciplinary changes. Originally centered on the comparison between capitalism and socialism, comparative economics has progressively shifted toward the analysis of institutional diversity, methodological pluralism, and systemic uncertainty. Following the collapse of socialism and the subsequent dominance of market-oriented paradigms, comparative analysis was often reduced to the study of transition and convergence. Recent global developments, however, have challenged this perspective, revealing persistent heterogeneity, instability, and non-linear trajectories across economic systems. The paper argues that comparative economics is today more relevant than ever, not as a field defined by specific objects of comparison, but as a methodological approach aimed at interpreting institutional complexity and contextual variation. The analysis underscores the limits of purely classificatory or efficiency-based comparisons and highlights the need for an institution-sensitive, interpretive comparative methodology to understand contemporary economic phenomena

Jürgen Backhaus is one of the founders of law and economics in Europe. He is a specialist in public finance and history of economic thought. His role in law and economics was important not only as a scholar who published (and edited) tens of books and articles but also as an entrepreneur.

Guido Calabresi is one of the founders of the law and economics movement. His approach, however, corresponds to a form of economic analysis of law that, we claim, is heterodox. We show why in this short notice.

This paper presents a behavioural investigation into music piracy using experimental data, to our knowledge one of the few studies of its kind. Employing experimental methods, we elicited preferences for legal and burned CDs, alongside hypothetical choices for further consumption behaviours such as downloading music. The subjects were university students, deemed the most appropriate sample for analysing legal and illegal music consumption patterns. We focus on how gender influences copyright infringement, specifically examining differences between men and women in their piracy behaviours. The results reveal significant gender disparities: women engage in piracy less frequently than men. However, once they do engage in illegal behaviour, that is, once they start to download music files illegally, the number of such files does not differ between men and women. Both genders perceive original CD prices as unfair, but women express stronger feelings of unfairness and place more value on legality. Women’s reluctance toward piracy seems driven by ethical concerns, while men place greater value on the product’s originality. In this context, our paper aims to provide valuable insights for policymakers, offering tools to develop more effective legal strategies while shedding light on a specific aspect of economic behaviour.

IntroductionDo externalities work and matter differently in a world of scarcity vs. a world of abundance? In this article, we critically examine the economic phenomena of externalities. The concept of externality, an important idea in economics and law, is useful in exploring the complex and dynamic relationships between resource supply and human flourishing within various sociotechnical systems.MethodsFirst, we define the basic concept and explain why it is fundamental to economic analysis of complex social environments Second, we briefly survey the intellectual history of externalities with the goal of tying together a few different strands of economic theory and providing a roadmap for a general theory of externalities. This discussion highlights a latent conflict between those who pursue and those who resist perfectibility (optimization) of social systems by internalizing externalities. Third, we compare externalities in worlds of scarcity and abundance.ResultsThis article develops the theoretical framework, including a brief intellectual history and notes toward the development of a general theory of externalities. As a conceptual tool, externalities enable one to identify and examine social interdependencies and to map their causes and consequences. Externalities provide evidence of social demand for governance institutions. This descriptive utility can and should inform normative analysis, the design of governance institutions, and comparative institutional analysis. We also raise a series of (mostly empirical) questions that should frame comparative institutional analysis and evaluation of different externalities in the digital networked world.DiscussionWe focus on the scarcity and abundance of knowledge resources and the (technological) means for participating in the production, dissemination, and modification of such resources. In the real, necessarily imperfect world where abundance and scarcity vary across resources, people, and contexts, externalities persist, indicate social demand for governance, and inform comparative analysis and design of governance institutions.JEL classificationD62, B52, D02.

This paper seeks to answer two main questions: whether restaurants using a national brand to capture customers in fact use original national ingredients for producing food and, in cases where original ingredients are not used, what is the economic rationale behind this choice? Specifically, the study focuses on Japanese restaurants in three Southeast Asian countries, using a theoretical model and an empirical investigation based on interviews and survey data collected through field research. Considering restaurants, their suppliers, and their customers, we show how a dual asymmetric-information problem exists, between suppliers and restaurants and between restaurants and their customers. The results indicate that a first reason for buying non-original ingredients-important especially for cheaper restaurants-is a desire to reduce costs. That said, the use of non-original ingredients occurs among all types of Japanese restaurants in the three studied countries. It does not depend on the presence of a Japanese chef or owner, nor on the share of Japanese customers. By contrast it does significantly depend on the reliability of the wholesale channel, and the resultant difficulties that restaurants encounter when buying original ingredients.

This paper advances the debate on scholarly publishing and the role of bibliometric indices in evaluating authors and their research, through a theoretical discussion and an empirical case study focused on economics and the impact factor. The rationale of the current bibliometric system is that reputation, assessed by citation figures, can be converted into an objective measure. We instead argue that it provides questionable results, because it fails to properly consider the meaning of indicators built for different purposes, as well as the psychological bias generated by the wrong interpretation of those indicators. However, the potential for abating these distortions exists.

One of the major challenges that result from the digital transformation occurring in our societies bears on its impact on the organization and regulation of the economy. This leads to a dramatic change to the economic institutions of capitalism—into what could be defined as platform capitalism—that rests on a fundamental dilemma between ‘decentralization’ on the one side and ‘concentration’ on the other. This is the main puzzle that the emergence of a big data driven economy is actually offering to law and economics scholars and to policy makers. This paper introduces to some of the major aspects of this dilemma.