Resumo

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 (Macher & Richman, 2008).

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.

Coase, R. H. (1937). The nature of the firm. Economica, 4(16), 386–405. Funk, P. (2007). Is there an expressive function of law? An empirical analysis of voting laws with symbolic fines. American Law and Economics Review, 9(1), 135–159. 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.