1 - Matheus Albergaria de Magalhães UNIVERSIDADE DE SÃO PAULO (USP) - Faculdade de Economia, Administração e Contabilidade (FEA-USP)
Reumo
The literature related to transaction costs witnessed an impressive growth over the last decades. However, despite all the progress made, few studies were able to evaluate the impacts of transaction costs in the field.
The present paper fills this gap by answering the following question: what happens when transaction costs go down in a common-pool resource?
At least since Coase's (1937) seminal contribution, academics and policy makers incorporated transaction costs as an important ingredient in their analyses. These costs, defined as the “. . . cost of using the price mechanism” (Coase, 1937, p. 390) or “. . . the costs of running the economic system” (Arrow, 1969, p. 59), have played a fundamental role in several areas of knowledge, such as accounting, business strategy, economics, marketing, and law, just to cite a few. In empirical terms, the literature on transaction costs’ measurement is currently recognized as a “success story”.
Employing a novel dataset related to more than 20,000 transactions in distinct libraries during a five-year period (2011/2015), I exploit variation in the timing of introduction of a cost-saving technology (return boxes) and its impacts over library performance measures.
Contrarily to standard arguments based on transaction costs, I find a result in which the instauration of return boxes tend, on average, to raise the probability of delays and borrowings’ effective durations.
In the end, one important question that remains unanswered is whether the empirical relevance of transaction costs depends on the specific context in which they are embedded or not.
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Coase, R. H. (1992). The institutional structure of production. American Economic Review, 82(4), 713–719. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/2117340
Funk, P. (2010). Social incentives and voter turnout: evidence from the Swiss mail ballot system. Journal of the European Economic Association, 8(5), 1077–1103.
Huck, S., & Rasul, I. (2010). Transactions costs in charitable giving: evidence from two field experiments. The BE Journal of Economic Analysis & Policy, 10(1), 31. http://doi.org