Law and Economics Commons^™

In Memory Of Professor Derrick Bell, Bell Symposium

Seattle University Law Review

Derrick Bell—law teacher, mentor, scholar, activist, author, loving husband and father—larger than the sum of his many parts. The articles in this symposium are fitting tributes to his legacy and valuable contributions to Derrick’s memory.

Law Without The State: Legal Attributes And The Coordination Of Decentralized Collective Punishment, Gillian K. Hadfield, Barry R. Weingast

University of Southern California Law and Economics Working Paper Series

Most social scientists take for granted that law is defined by the presence of a centralized authority capable of exacting coercive penalties for violations of legal rules. Moreover, the existing approach to analyzing law in economics and positive political theory works with a very thin concept of law that does not account for the distinctive attributes of legal order as compared with other forms of social order. Drawing on a model developed elsewhere, we reinterpret key case studies to demonstrate how a theoretically informed approach illuminates questions about emergence, stability, and function of law in supporting economic and democratic growth.

Through A Latte, Darkly: Starbucks' Window Into Stateless Income Tax Planning, Edward D. Kleinbard

University of Southern California Law and Economics Working Paper Series

This paper uses Starbucks Corporation, the premier roaster, marketer and retailer of specialty coffee in the world, as an example of stateless income tax planning in action. “Stateless income” comprises income derived for tax purposes by a multinational group from business activities in a country other than the domicile of the group’s ultimate parent company, but which is subject to tax only in a jurisdiction that is neither the source of the factors of production through which the income was derived, nor the domicile of the group’s parent company.

The paper reviews both Starbucks’ recent U.K. tax ...

Bedside Bureaucrats: Why Medicare Reform Hasn't Worked, Nicholas Bagley

Articles

Notwithstanding its obvious importance, Medicare is almost invisible in the legal literature. Part of the reason is that administrative law scholars typically train their attention on the sources of external control over agencies’ exercise of the vast discretion that Congress so often delegates to them. Medicare’s administrators, however, wield considerably less policy discretion than the agencies that feature prominently in the legal commentary. Traditional administrative law thus yields slim insight into Medicare’s operation. But questions about external control do not—or at least they should not—exhaust the field. An old and often disregarded tradition in administrative law ...

A Process Account Of The Endowment Effect: Voluntary Debiasing Through Agents And Markets, Jennifer Arlen, Stephan Tontrup

New York University Public Law and Legal Theory Working Papers

We contest the loss aversion theory of the endowment effect, in which the effect depends on the status of endowment alone. Instead, we propose that the nature of the trading process determines whether people resist or accept an exchange by affecting the responsibility people feel for their choice. The more they feel responsible for the decision, the more they expect experiencing regret over a negative outcome. Aversion to regret causes people to resist a rational trade and exhibit the endowment effect. In a series of experiments, we analyze two institutions that alter the trading process and reduce perceived responsibility --agency ...

A Process Account Of The Endowment Effect: Voluntary Debiasing Through Agents And Markets, Jennifer Arlen, Stephan Tontrup

New York University Law and Economics Working Papers

We contest the loss aversion theory of the endowment effect, in which the effect depends on the status of endowment alone. Instead, we propose that the nature of the trading process determines whether people resist or accept an exchange by affecting the responsibility people feel for their choice. The more they feel responsible for the decision, the more they expect experiencing regret over a negative outcome. Aversion to regret causes people to resist a rational trade and exhibit the endowment effect. In a series of experiments, we analyze two institutions that alter the trading process and reduce perceived responsibility --agency ...

Janus Capital Group, Inc. V. First Derivative Traders: Further Limited Liability, And Missing An Opportunity To Curb Corporate Misconduct, Zachary K. Ostro

Journal of Business & Technology Law

No abstract provided.

Teaching Antitrust After The Financial Crisis, Maurice E. Stucke

Journal of Business & Technology Law

No abstract provided.

Teaching Business Associations Law In The Evolving New Market Economy, Joan Macleod Heminway

Journal of Business & Technology Law

No abstract provided.

Not (Necessarily) Narrower: Rethinking The Relative Scope Of Copyright Protection For Designs, Sarah Burstein

IP Theory

No abstract provided.

From Here To Eternity: The Folly Of Perpetual Trusts, Lawrence W. Waggoner

University of Michigan Program in Law and Economics

Trusts that can operate for as many as a thousand years or even forever, typically for the benefit of the settlor’s descendants living from time to time, now and in the future, are all the rage in banking and estate-planning circles. Before 1986, when Congress passed the federal generation-skipping transfer tax (GST tax), settlors had little incentive and probably little desire to establish perpetual trusts, even though they were permitted to do so under the law of Wisconsin, South Dakota, or Idaho. The GST tax created an artificial incentive for the wealthy to establish such trusts.

The origin of ...

What Consensus? Ideology, Politics And Elections Still Matter, Steven C. Salop

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This article, which was prepared for an ABA Antitrust Section Panel, discusses the role of ideology and politics in antitrust enforcement and the impact of elections in the last twenty year on enforcement and policy at the federal antitrust agencies. The article explains the differences in antitrust ideologies and their impact on policy preferences. The article then uses a database of civil non-merger complaints by the DOJ and FTC over the last three Presidential administrations to analyze changes in the number, type and other characteristics of antitrust enforcement. It also discusses change in vertical merger enforcement and other antirust policies ...

Meaning In The Natural World, Joseph Vining

University of Michigan Program in Law and Economics

James Boyd White devoted much of his work to the rescue of meaning in language, art, and the human world. A turn to the natural world may underscore his confidence that an individual's statement of law can be more than a disguised expression of individual will and desire. This essay may also suggest one more way toward hope that a realistic sense of the natural world need not threaten confidence in the reality of beauty and meaning in our human world.

Congressional Silence And The Statutory Interpretation Game, Paul Stancil

William and Mary Law Review

This Article explores the circumstances under which the federal legislative apparatus may be unable to respond to a politically objectionable statutory interpretation from the Supreme Court. The Article builds upon existing economic models of statutory interpretation, incorporating transaction costs into the analysis for the first time. The Article concludes by identifying recent real-world disputes in which transaction costs likely constrained Congress and the President from overriding the Court.

When The State Harms Competition ― The Role For Competition Law, Eleanor M. Fox, Deborah Healey

New York University Law and Economics Working Papers

This article is about the reach of antitrust laws to proscribe or override anticompetitive acts and measures of the states. While it was once the case that antitrust (or competition) laws were reserved for private restraints, a more modern view of the state and the market recognizes the integral relationship between them. The authors surveyed 32 jurisdictions and found that antitrust/competition laws of a number of jurisdictions condemned certain state acts and measures. This article describes and summarizes the research and combines the research findings with conceptual analysis to recommend relevant rules and principles that might be adopted as ...

Intellectual Property Defenses, Gideon Parchomovsky, Alex Stein

Scholarship at Penn Law

In this Essay, we offer an integrated theory of intellectual property defenses. We demonstrate that all intellectual property defenses can be fitted into three conceptual categories: general, individualized and class defenses. A general defense is the inverse of a right in rem. It goes to the validity of the intellectual property right asserted by the plaintiff, and when raised successfully it relieves not only the actual defendant, but also the public at large, of the duty to comply with the plaintiff’s intellectual property right. An individualized defense, as we define it, is the inverse of an in personam right ...

A World Of Choices, David A. Wirth

Boston College Law School Faculty Papers

In this keynote address, David Wirth identifies fundamental and dynamic attributes of globalisation, examines the need to confront institutional failures and systemic challenges of multilateral governance, and offers some preliminary observations on directions in which global governance might evolve to achieve salutary outcomes that are good for all.

The False Promise Of Risk-Reducing Incentive Pay: Evidence From Executive Pensions And Deferred Compensation, Kelli A. Alces, Brian D. Galle

Boston College Law School Faculty Papers

The average publicly-traded firm pays its CEO millions of dollars in deferred compensation and defined-benefit pension commitments. Scholars debate whether firms use these payments to efficiently align managerial interests with those of creditors, or whether instead they represent “hidden” forms of rent extraction. Yet others recommend these forms of debt-like incentive compensation, sometimes called “inside debt,” as a way of controlling risk-taking in systemically important financial institutions.

We argue instead that inside debt is unlikely to be efficient in either setting. Inside debt is costlier and more complex than other tools for managing risk, such as covenants or simply cutting ...

Carrots, Sticks, And Salience, Brian D. Galle

Boston College Law School Faculty Papers

This Article considers the second-best design of Pigouvian taxes and subsidies in the presence of agents who are imperfectly aware of the instrument. Until very recently, the price instrument literature has assumed perfect rationality, and even the handful of prior attempts to account for “hidden” prices focus mainly on the income tax. I extend these efforts in several directions. First, I show that the best available instrument for correcting negative externalities is often one whose price is partially adjusted upwards -- or, in the case of subsidies, downwards -- to counter-act the neglect of irrational actors. In addition, I argue that the ...

Copyright Without Creators, Jonathan M. Barnett

University of Southern California Law and Economics Working Paper Series

Copyright is typically justified by the rationale that profits induce authors and other artists to invest resources in cultural production. This rationale is vulnerable to the objection that some artists have intrinsic incentives to invest in cultural production and do not require significant capital to do so. Even accepting this objection, copyright is justified by an alternative rationale: it supports the profit-motivated intermediaries that bear the high costs and risks involved in evaluating, distributing and marketing content in mass-cultural markets. This “authorless” rationale is consistent with the intermediated structure of mature mass-cultural markets and accounts for long-standing features of copyright ...