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Full-Text Articles in Law

Market Efficiency And The Problem Of Retail Flight, Alicia J. Davis Nov 2014

Market Efficiency And The Problem Of Retail Flight, Alicia J. Davis

Articles

In 1950, 91 % of common stock in the U.S. was owned directly by individual inves­ tors. Today, that percentage stands at only 23%. The mass exodus of retail investors and their investment dollars has negative implications not only for capital formation and investor protection, but also for market efficiency. Individual investors are often assumed to be noise traders who distort stock prices and harm market functioning. Therefore, some argue that their withdrawal from the market should be of little concern; indeed, it should be celebrated. Recent empirical evidence calls this assertion of retail noise trading into doubt, and this …


The Margin Of Appreciation In International Investment Law, Julian Arato Jan 2014

The Margin Of Appreciation In International Investment Law, Julian Arato

Articles

Investment treaties tend to say nothing, or only very little, about the appropriate standard of review for arbitrating disputes between sovereign states and foreign investors. Most treaties do not address whether states should be afforded any deference in their own assessment of their treaty obligations. Neither do they specify the converse, that state action must be strictly reviewed. They are simply silent – and their silence has been interpreted in innumerable ways by different tribunals. This interpretive chaos has generated calls for a unified approach – one that would resolve the uncertain and fragmented status quo, while being sufficiently flexible …


Actavis, The Reverse Payment Fallacy, And The Continuing Need For Regulatory Solutions, Daniel A. Crane Jan 2014

Actavis, The Reverse Payment Fallacy, And The Continuing Need For Regulatory Solutions, Daniel A. Crane

Articles

The Actavis decision punted more than it decided. Although narrowing the range of possible outcomes by rejecting the legal rules at the extremes and opting for a rule of reason middle ground, the opinion failed to grapple with the most challenging issues of regulatory policy raised by pharmaceutical patent settlements. In particular, it failed to clearly delineate the social costs of permitting and disallowing patent settlements, avoided grappling with the crucial issues of patent validity and infringement, and erroneously focused on “reverse payments” as a distinctive antitrust problem when equally or more anticompetitive settlements can be crafted without reverse payments. …


Understanding Insurance Anti-Discrimination Laws, Ronen Avraham, Kyle D. Logue, Daniel Schwarcz Jan 2014

Understanding Insurance Anti-Discrimination Laws, Ronen Avraham, Kyle D. Logue, Daniel Schwarcz

Articles

Insurance companies are in the business of discrimination. Insurers attempt to segregate insureds into separate risk pools based on the differences in their risk profiles, first, so that different premiums can be charged to the different groups based on their differing risks and, second, to incentivize risk reduction by insureds. This is why we let insurers discriminate. There are limits, however, to the types of discrimination that are permissible for insurers. But what exactly are those limits and how are they justified? To answer these questions, this Article (a) articulates the leading fairness and efficiency arguments for and against limiting …


Towards A Universal Framework For Insurance Anti-Discrimination Laws, Ronen Avraham, Kyle D. Logue, Daniel Schwarcz Jan 2014

Towards A Universal Framework For Insurance Anti-Discrimination Laws, Ronen Avraham, Kyle D. Logue, Daniel Schwarcz

Articles

Discrimination in insurance is principally regulated at the state level. Surprisingly, there is a great deal of variation across coverage lines and policyholder characteristics in how and the extent to which risk classification by insurers is limited. Some statutes expressly permit insurers to consider certain characteristics, while other characteristics are forbidden or limited in various ways. What explains this variation across coverage lines and policyholder characteristics? Drawing on a unique, hand-collected data-set consisting of the laws regulating insurer risk classification in fifty-one U.S. jurisdictions, this Article argues that much of the variation in state-level regulation of risk classification can in …


Concentrated Ownership And Corporate Control: Wallenberg Sphere And Samsung Group, Hwa-Jin Kim Jan 2014

Concentrated Ownership And Corporate Control: Wallenberg Sphere And Samsung Group, Hwa-Jin Kim

Articles

Samsung Group’s success cannot be attributed to its corporate governance structure, at least thus far. The corporate governance of Samsung has been rather controversial. As the group faces the succession issue the corporate governance has become as crucial as their new products and services. Samsung has discovered a role model on the other side of the planet, Wallenberg Sphere in Sweden. Much effort has been made to learn about Wallenberg’s arrangements and key to its success. However, a fundamental difference between the institutions in Sweden and Korea has made the corporate structures of the two groups radically different. Wallenberg uses …


Revolution In Manipulation Law: The New Cftc Rules And The Urgent Need For Economic And Empirical Analyses, Rosa M. Abrantes-Metz, Gabriel V. Rauterberg, Andrew Verstein Mar 2013

Revolution In Manipulation Law: The New Cftc Rules And The Urgent Need For Economic And Empirical Analyses, Rosa M. Abrantes-Metz, Gabriel V. Rauterberg, Andrew Verstein

Articles

Three major banks have now admitted that their employees manipulated worldwide interest rates through the London Interbank Offered Rate (Libor), the most widely used interest rate index. Libor is the interest rate term for trillions of dollars of swaps and loans, and its manipulation may have been used to extract billions of dollars. These allegations come just as commodities manipulation law has been dramatically reformed and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) given vast new regulatory powers. This Article provides the first extended, scholarly analysis of the CFTC’s new anti-manipulation rules. We consider the difficulty the rules address: Commodities manipulation …


Income And Substitution Effects Of Estate Taxation, James R. Hines Jr. Jan 2013

Income And Substitution Effects Of Estate Taxation, James R. Hines Jr.

Articles

This paper evaluates the effect of estate taxes on labor supply. The analysis decomposes the effect of estate taxation into the substitution effect of relative price changes and the two income effects for which the estate tax is responsible. These two income effects arise from tax burdens on those who leave estates plus tax burdens on those who receive them. Despite the double income burden of the estate tax, existing empirical evidence suggests that the net effect of estate taxation on aggregate labor supply is uncertain.


On The Role Of Cost-Benefit Analysis In Criminal Justice Policy: A Response To The Imprisoner's Dilemma, Sonja B. Starr Jan 2013

On The Role Of Cost-Benefit Analysis In Criminal Justice Policy: A Response To The Imprisoner's Dilemma, Sonja B. Starr

Articles

With one in 100 adult Americans behind bars, and prison budgets consuming an increasing share of state budgets, few social policy issues compare in significance to the debate over which criminal offenders should be incarcerated and for how long. David Abrams' article, The Impriasoner's Dilemma: A Cost-Benefit Approach to Incarceration,' makes an important contribution to that debate, offering an economic approach to assessing the net benefits of holding or freeing prisoners on the incarceration margin. In this short Response, I first highlight several strengths of Abrams' piece and discuss the possible case that could be made for incorporating formal cost-benefit …


Bedside Bureaucrats: Why Medicare Reform Hasn't Worked, Nicholas Bagley Jan 2013

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 focuses not on external …


Index Theory: The Law, Promise And Failure Of Financial Indices, Gabriel V. Rauterberg, Andrew Verstein Jan 2013

Index Theory: The Law, Promise And Failure Of Financial Indices, Gabriel V. Rauterberg, Andrew Verstein

Articles

Financial indices, like the S&P 500 or the Consumer Price Index, have become a ubiquitous feature of our financial markets. One index, the London InterBank Offered Rate (“Libor”), may be the world’s most important number, an interest rate benchmark upon which hundreds of trillions of dollars depend. Yet, almost everyday new revelations emerge that Libor was tampered with during the height of the financial crisis by one or many of the world’s most prominent banks, with billions of dollars potentially misappropriated. This index disruption has attracted tremendous interest from regulators, private litigants, and market observers. Despite their importance, however, financial …


Assessing Transnational Private Regulation Of The Otc Derivatives Market: Isda, The Bba, And The Future Of Financial Reform, Gabriel V. Rauterberg, Andrew Verstein Jan 2013

Assessing Transnational Private Regulation Of The Otc Derivatives Market: Isda, The Bba, And The Future Of Financial Reform, Gabriel V. Rauterberg, Andrew Verstein

Articles

For the last twenty years, the dominant narrative of the over-the-counter derivatives market has been one of absent regulation, deregulation, and regulatory conflict, predictably resulting in disaster. This Article challenges this narrative, arguing that the global derivatives market has been subject to pervasive and harmonized regulation by what should be recognized as transnational private regulators. Recognizing the reality of widespread transnational private regulation of derivatives has significant implications, which this Article explores. Appreciating the actual regulatory status quo is essential if policymakers are to correctly diagnose problems, avoid past regulatory errors, and plan effective remedies. There are also advantages to …


Were Standard Oil's Railroad Rebates And Drawbacks Cost Justified?, Daniel A. Crane Jan 2012

Were Standard Oil's Railroad Rebates And Drawbacks Cost Justified?, Daniel A. Crane

Articles

In this essay, written for a symposium on the centennial anniversary of the Supreme Court's Standard Oil decision, I reexamine the costjustification question. In the first part, I explain why the cost-justification question is central to the entire case and its acquired and evolving historical meaning. In the second part, I review the evidence of claimed efficiencies passed on to the railroads. I conclude that there is evidence that Standard Oil passed along significant cost savings to the railroads and that these savings could have justified a portion of the rebates and drawbacks. However, I conclude that there is little …


Rural Hospital Ownership: Medical Service Provision, Market Mix, And Spillover Effects, Jill R. Horwitz, Austin Nichols Jan 2011

Rural Hospital Ownership: Medical Service Provision, Market Mix, And Spillover Effects, Jill R. Horwitz, Austin Nichols

Articles

Objective. To test whether nonprofit, for-profit, or government hospital ownership affects medical service provision in rural hospital markets, either directly or through the spillover effects of ownership mix. Data Sources/Study Setting. Data are from the American Hospital Association, U.S. Census, CMS Healthcare Cost Report Information System and Prospective Payment System Minimum Data File, and primary data collection for geographic coordinates. The sample includes all nonfederal, general medical, and surgical hospitals located outside of metropolitan statistical areas and within the continental United States from 1988 to 2005. Study Design. We estimate multivariate regression models to examine the effects of (1) hospital …


Free Rider: A Justification For Mandatory Medical Insurance Under Health Care Reform?, Douglas A. Kahn, Jeffrey H. Kahn Jan 2011

Free Rider: A Justification For Mandatory Medical Insurance Under Health Care Reform?, Douglas A. Kahn, Jeffrey H. Kahn

Articles

Section 1501 of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act added section 5000A to the Internal Revenue Code to require most individuals in the United States, beginning in the year 2014, to purchase an established minimum level of medical insurance. This requirement, which is enforced by a penalty imposed on those who fail to comply, is sometimes referred to as the “individual mandate.” The individual mandate is one element of a vast change to the provision of medical care that Congress implemented in 2010. The individual mandate has proved to be controversial and has been the subject of a number …


Narrowing The Tax Gap Through Presumptive Taxation, Kyle D. Logue, Gustavo G. Vettori Jan 2011

Narrowing The Tax Gap Through Presumptive Taxation, Kyle D. Logue, Gustavo G. Vettori

Articles

Can the United States government significantly reduce the federal tax gap? This question has attracted a great deal of scholarly attention over the years and has been the focus of numerous government reports. The "tax gap" is the official term for the Treasury Department's estimate of the difference between what American taxpayers should pay to the federal government in a given tax year (that is, the amount of tax they owe, based on a reasonable interpretation of existing tax laws as applied to particular taxpayers' circumstances) and what they actually pay. This estimate is derived from painstaking and detailed audits …


The Unaffordable Health Care Act - A Reponse To Professors Bagley And Horwitz, Douglas A. Kahn, Jeffrey H. Kahn Jan 2011

The Unaffordable Health Care Act - A Reponse To Professors Bagley And Horwitz, Douglas A. Kahn, Jeffrey H. Kahn

Articles

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 has stirred considerable controversy. In the public debate over the program, many of its proponents have defended it by focusing on what is sometimes called the “free-rider” problem. In a prior article, we contended that the free-rider problem has been greatly exaggerated and was not a significant factor in the congressional decision to adopt the Act. We maintained that the free-rider issue is a red herring advanced to trigger an emotional attraction to the Act and distract attention from the actual issues that favor and disfavor its adoption. In a recently …


Tax Policy And The Efficiency Of U.S. Direct Investment Abroad, Mihir A. Desai, C. Fritz Foley, James R. Hines Jr. Jan 2011

Tax Policy And The Efficiency Of U.S. Direct Investment Abroad, Mihir A. Desai, C. Fritz Foley, James R. Hines Jr.

Articles

Deferral of U.S. taxes on foreign source income is commonly characterized as a subsidy to foreign investment, as reflected in its inclusion among “tax expenditures” and occasional calls for its repeal. This paper analyzes the extent to which tax deferral and other policies inefficiently subsidize U.S. direct investment abroad. Investments are dynamically inefficient if they consistently generate less in returns to investors than they absorb in new investment funds. From 1982–2010, repatriated earnings from foreign affiliates exceeded net capital investments by $1.1 trillion in 2010 dollars, and from 1950–2010, repatriated earnings and net interest from foreign affiliates exceeded net equity …


Harry Potter And The Trouble With Tort Theory, Scott Hershovitz Jan 2011

Harry Potter And The Trouble With Tort Theory, Scott Hershovitz

Articles

Economists argue that tort law promotes an efficient allocation of resources to safety, while philosophers contend that it dispenses corrective justice. Despite the divide, the leading tort theories share something in common: they are grounded in an unduly narrow view of tort. Both economists and philosophers confuse the institution of tort law with the rules that are distinctive of it. They offer theories of tort's substantive rules, but for the most part ignore the procedures by which those rules are implemented. As a consequence, both miss and misconstrue much about tort law. The problem is particularly acute for economists. They …


Why It's Called The Affordable Care Act, Nicholas Bagley, Jill R. Horwitz Jan 2011

Why It's Called The Affordable Care Act, Nicholas Bagley, Jill R. Horwitz

Articles

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 (“ACA”) raises numerous policy and legal issues, but none have attracted as much attention from lawyers as Section 1501. This provision, titled “Maintenance of Mini-mum Essential Coverage,” but better known as the “individual mandate,” requires most Americans to obtain health insurance for themselves and their dependents by 2014. We are dismayed that the narrow issue of the mandate and the narrower issue of free riding have garnered so much attention when our nation’s health-care system suffers from countless problems. By improving quality, controlling costs, and extending coverage to the uninsured, the …


State Fiscal Policies And Transitory Income Fluctuations, James R. Hines Jr. Sep 2010

State Fiscal Policies And Transitory Income Fluctuations, James R. Hines Jr.

Articles

State and local expenditure and tax revenue respond less to the business cycle than do federal spending and revenue, thereby reducing the countercyclicality of total government expenditure and revenue. This paper considers forces responsible for the cyclical pattern of state expenditure and revenue. Annual fluctuations in state personal income are associated with small changes in state spending and significant changes in tax receipts; receipt of federal grants is associated with greater state spending. Tax collections, and to a lesser degree expenditure, of larger states are more closely associated with annual income fluctuations than are the tax collections and expenditure of …


Reply To Becker And Fuest, James R. Hines Jr. Jan 2010

Reply To Becker And Fuest, James R. Hines Jr.

Articles

It is an understatement to say that the appropriate taxation of foreign business income is a controversial and potentially confusing topic. One of the mysteries of international taxation has been that the prescriptions of what, until recently, was the accepted academic wisdom differs so sharply from widespread international practice. In an important contribution, Richman (1963) noted that a home government confronted with the choice of where it would prefer one of its resident taxpayers to allocate a single unit of capital would weigh the after-foreign-tax return from investing abroad against the pre-tax return from investing at home. From this observation, …


Law And The Social Control Of American Capitalism, William J. Novak Jan 2010

Law And The Social Control Of American Capitalism, William J. Novak

Articles

This Essay is part of a larger, ongoing investigation of the role of law in the creation of a modern American state from 1877 to 1932. That project charts the decline of an early nineteenth-century world of local, common law self government (what I called in a previous work a “well-regulated society”) and the rise of a distinctly modern administrative regulatory state in the United States. This new legal-political regime was rooted in three interlinked developments: the centralization of public power; the individualization of private right; and the constitutionalization of the rule of law. Beginning soon after the Civil War, …


Treasure Islands, James R. Hines Jr. Jan 2010

Treasure Islands, James R. Hines Jr.

Articles

In movies and novels, tax havens are often settings for shady international deals; in practice, they are rather less flashy. Tax havens are countries and territories that offer low tax rates and favorable regulatory policies to foreign investors. For example, tax havens typically tax inbound investment at zero or very low rates and further encourage investment with telecommunications and transportation facilities, other business infrastructure, favorable legal environments, and limited bureaucratic hurdles to starting new firms. Tax havens are small: most are islands; all but a few have populations below one million; and they have above-average incomes. Tax havens are also …


The Attack On Nonprofit Status: A Charitable Assessment, James R. Hines Jr., Jill R. Horwitz, Austin Nichols Jan 2010

The Attack On Nonprofit Status: A Charitable Assessment, James R. Hines Jr., Jill R. Horwitz, Austin Nichols

Articles

American nonprofit organizations receive favorable tax treatment, including tax exemptions and tax-deductibility of contributions, in return for their devotion to charitable purposes and restrictions not to distribute profits. Recent efforts to extend some or all of these tax benefits to for-profit companies making social investments, including the creation of the new hybrid nonprofit/for-profit company form known as the Low-Profit Limited Liability Company, threaten to undermine the vitality of the nonprofit sector and the integrity of the tax system. Reform advocates maintain that the ability to compensate executives based on performance and to distribute profits when attractive investment opportunities are scarce …


Coordinating Sanctions In Torts, Kyle D. Logue Jan 2010

Coordinating Sanctions In Torts, Kyle D. Logue

Articles

This Article begins with the standard Law and Economics account of tort law as a regulatory tool or system of deterrence, that is, as a means of giving regulated parties the optimal ex ante incentives to minimize the costs of accidents. Building on this fairly standard (albeit not universally accepted) picture of tort law, the Article asks the question how tort law should adjust, if at all, to coordinate with already existing non-tort systems of regulation. Thus, if a particular activity is already subject to extensive agency-based regulation (whether in the form of command-and-control requirements or in the form of …


Of Coase, Calabresi, And Optimal Tax Liability, Kyle D. Logue, Joel Slemrod Jan 2010

Of Coase, Calabresi, And Optimal Tax Liability, Kyle D. Logue, Joel Slemrod

Articles

The Article proceeds as follows. Part II offers a primer on the Coase Theorem, beginning with the classic case of neighbor externalizing on neighbor (farmer and rancher), and it explains the basic invariance propositions. Part III shifts the focus to Coasean situations involving buyers and sellers in a market or contractual relationship, buyers and sellers whose market interactions cause harm to third parties. Using supply-and-demand diagrams, we illustrate (in a new way) some of the most basic findings of the economic analysis of law, including both the Coasean invariance and efficiency propositions and the Calabresian least-cost avoider idea. Also in …


The Last Best Hope For Progressivity In Tax, E. J. Mccaffery, James R. Hines Jr. Jan 2010

The Last Best Hope For Progressivity In Tax, E. J. Mccaffery, James R. Hines Jr.

Articles

We argue that a spending tax, as opposed to an income or wage tax, is the “last best hope” for a return to significantly more progressive marginal tax rates than obtain today. The simple explanation for this central claim looks to incentive effects, especially for “rich people,” as both economists and commentators are inclined to focus. High marginal tax rates under an income tax fall on and hence deter the socially productive activities of work and savings. High marginal rates under a wage tax fall on and hence deter the socially productive activity of work alone. But high marginal rates …


Peter Mieszkowski And The General Equilibrium Revolution In Public Finance, James R. Hines Jr. Jan 2009

Peter Mieszkowski And The General Equilibrium Revolution In Public Finance, James R. Hines Jr.

Articles

The importance of understanding the implications of general equilibrium is by now abundantly clear to researchers analyzing public fi nance issues. What is perhaps less apparent is that this was not always so. The study of public fi nance was radically transformed during the 15 years between 1959 and 1974 by the pioneering efforts of a small number of leading scholars, notably including Peter Mieszkowski. Thanks to their efforts, the analysis of applied problems in public finance moved from partial equilibrium to general equilibrium, providing the methods and insights that characterize modern public economics. The transformation began with the publication …


Intellectual Liability, Daniel A. Crane Jan 2009

Intellectual Liability, Daniel A. Crane

Articles

Intellectual property is increasingly a misnomer since the right to exclude is the defining characteristic of property and incentives to engage in inventive and creative activity are increasingly being granted in the form of liability rights (which allow the holder of the right to collect a royalty from users) rather than property rights (which allow the holder of the right to exclude others from using the invention or creation). Much of this recent reorientation in the direction of liability rules arises from a concern over holdout or monopoly power in intellectual property. The debate over whether liability rules or property …