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Law and Economics

Columbia Law School

Series

2005

SSRN

Articles 1 - 6 of 6

Full-Text Articles in Law

Risk Management In Long-Term Contracts, Victor P. Goldberg Jan 2005

Risk Management In Long-Term Contracts, Victor P. Goldberg

Faculty Scholarship

Long-term contracts are designed to manage risk. After a brief discussion of why it is unhelpful to invoke risk aversion for analyzing serious commercial transactions between sophisticated entities, this paper focuses on adaptation to changed circumstances. In particular, it considers the options to abandon and the discretion to change quantity. It then analyzes a poorly designed contract between Alcoa and Essex showing how the parties misframed their problem and designed a long-term contract that was doomed to fail.


Marine-Salvage Law And Marine-Peril-Related Policy: A Second-Best And Third-Best Economic-Efficiency Analysis Of The Problem, The Law, And The Classic Landes And Posner Study, Richard S. Markovits Jan 2005

Marine-Salvage Law And Marine-Peril-Related Policy: A Second-Best And Third-Best Economic-Efficiency Analysis Of The Problem, The Law, And The Classic Landes And Posner Study, Richard S. Markovits

Faculty Scholarship

This Article (1) delineates the different kinds of allocative costs that marine-peril contingencies can generate and the different kinds of marine-peril-related decisions that can generate allocative inefficiency (marine-salvage-operation investment decisions; decisions about whether to offer to attempt or to actually attempt marine rescues; decisions about the character of the marine-rescue attempts that are made; decisions by potential rescuees to accept or reject offers of marine-rescue attempts; and decisions by potential rescuees to make or reject various marine-peril-avoidance moves); (2) defines the formal meaning of "the most-allocatively-efficient response a State can make to marine-peril contingencies;" (3) explains why, standing alone, judge-prescribed …


The Political Economy Of International Sales Law, Clayton P. Gillette, Robert E. Scott Jan 2005

The Political Economy Of International Sales Law, Clayton P. Gillette, Robert E. Scott

Faculty Scholarship

The United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods, or CISG, has been adopted by more than 60 countries in an effort to harmonize the law that applies to international sales contracts. In this paper, we argue that the effort to create uniform international sales law (ISL) fails to supply contracting parties with the default terms they prefer, thus violating the normative criterion that justifies the law-making process for commercial actors in the first instance. Our argument rests on three claims. First, we contend that the process by which uniform ISL is drafted will dictate the form …


Going-Private Decisions And The Sarbanes-Oxley Act Of 2002: A Cross-Country Analysis, Ehud Kamar, Pinar Karaca-Mandic, Eric L. Talley Jan 2005

Going-Private Decisions And The Sarbanes-Oxley Act Of 2002: A Cross-Country Analysis, Ehud Kamar, Pinar Karaca-Mandic, Eric L. Talley

Faculty Scholarship

This article investigates whether the passage and the implementation of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (SOX) drove firms out of the public capital market. To control for other factors affecting exit decisions, we examine the post-SOX change in the propensity of public American targets to be bought by private acquirers rather than public ones with the corresponding change for foreign targets, which were outside the purview of SOX. Our findings are consistent with the hypothesis that SOX induced small firms to exit the public capital market during the year following its enactment. In contrast, SOX appears to have had little …


Reading Wood V. Lucy, Lady Duff-Gordon With Help From The Kewpie Dolls, Victor P. Goldberg Jan 2005

Reading Wood V. Lucy, Lady Duff-Gordon With Help From The Kewpie Dolls, Victor P. Goldberg

Faculty Scholarship

In Wood v. Lucy, Lady Duff-Gordon, Cardozo found consideration in an apparently illusory contract by implying a reasonable effort obligation. Unbeknownst to Cardozo, Wood had agreed to represent Rose O'Neill, the inventory of the kewpie doll in an earlier exclusive contract. Wood sued O'Neill two months prior to entering into the Lucy arrangement. That contract included an explicit best efforts clause. The failure to include such a clause in this contract was, quite likely, deliberate, suggesting that Wood was trying to avoid making a binding commitment to Lucy. The paper examines both the kewpie doll and Lucy contract in some …


How Law Affects Lending, Rainer F.H. Haselmann, Katharina Pistor, Vikrant Vig Jan 2005

How Law Affects Lending, Rainer F.H. Haselmann, Katharina Pistor, Vikrant Vig

Faculty Scholarship

The paper explores how legal change affects lending behavior of banks in twelve transition economies of Central and Eastern Europe. In contrast to previous studies, we use bank level rather than aggregate data, which allows us to control for country level heterogeneity and analyze the effect of legal change on different types of lenders. Using a differences-in-differences methodology to analyze the within country variation of changes in creditor rights protection, we find that the credit supplied by banks increases subsequent to legal change. Further, we show that collateral law matters more for credit market development than bankruptcy law. We also …