Law Commons^™

The Political Economy Of Wto Exceptions, Timothy Meyer

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

In a bid to save the planet from rising temperatures, the European Union is introducing a carbon border adjustment mechanism-essentially a levy on imports from countries with weak climate rules. The United States, Canada, and Japan are all openly mulling similar proposals. The Biden Administration is adopting new Buy American rules, while countries around the world debate new supply chain regulations to address public health issues arising from COVID-19 and shortages in critical components like computer chips. These public policy initiatives-addressing the central environmental, public health, and economic issues of the day-all likely violate World Trade Organization (WTO) rules governing …

Efficient Ethical Principles For Making Fatal Choices, W. Kip Viscusi

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Resource allocations of all kinds inevitably encounter financial constraints, making it infeasible to make financially unbounded commitments. Such resource constraints arise in almost all health and safety risk contexts, which has led to a regulatory oversight process to ascertain whether the expected benefits of major regulations outweigh the costs. The economic approach to monetizing health and safety risks is well established and is based on the value of a statistical life (“VSL”). Government agencies use these values reflecting attitudes toward small changes in risk to monetize the largest benefit component of regulations--that dealing with mortality risks. This procedure consequently bases …

Dynamic Relationships Between Social Norms And Pro-Environmental Behavior: Evidence From Household Recycling, W. Kip Viscusi, Joel Huber, Jason Bell

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Social norms are strongly associated with pro-environmental behaviors, but the evolution and dynamic effects of norms are less well understood. This article builds on the distinction of norms being descriptive, characterizing what people actually do, or injunctive, characterizing what people should do. It identifies four categories of norms with the further distinction of whether the norms arise from the personal beliefs and actions or from the behaviors and judgments of others. The analysis uses five years of longitudinal US data that track household recycling and controls for household characteristics as well as differences in state recycling laws. The results extend …

Behavioral Science Tools To Strengthen Energy & Environmental Policy, Michael P. Vandenbergh, Erez Yoeli, David V. Budescu, Et Al.

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

To increase consumers’ conservation of energy and other resources,government agencies, utilities, and energy-related businesses can complement regulatory and market-based policies with simple and effective behavioral interventions grounded in extensive behavioral science research. In this article, we review behavioral tools that we find especially promising. Collectively, these tools help meet four behavioral objectives:getting people’s attention; engaging people’s desire to contribute to the social good; making complex information more accessible; and facilitating accurate assessment of risks, costs, and benefits.

Intended And Unintended Consequences Of Youth Bicycle Helmet Laws, Christopher (Kitt) Carpenter, Mark Stehr

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

More than 20 states have adopted laws requiring youths to wear a helmet when riding a bicycle. We confirm previous research indicating that these laws reduced fatalities and increased helmet use, but we also show that the laws significantly reduced youth bicycling. We find this result in standard two-way fixed-effects models of parental reports of youth bicycling and in triple-difference models of self-reported bicycling among high school youths that explicitly account for bicycling by youths just above the age threshold of the helmet law. Our results highlight important intended and unintended consequences of a well-intentioned public policy.

Condemning The Decisions Of The Past, Christopher Serkin

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

This brief Essay, part of a Fordham Urban Law Journal Symposium on eminent domain in New York, argues that there is a seldom-recognized purpose to eminent domain: preserving the ability of elected representatives to respond to the will of the people. The essay proposes that eminent domain allows government to depart from the policy choices of administrations which came before and is therefore a tool for preserving "democratic legitimacy." It explores this theory by examining examples such as breaking up the adult use zones in Times Square and reclaiming New York's waterfront.

Lying And Getting Caught: An Empirical Study Of The Effect Of Securities Class Action Settlements On Targeted Firms, Randall Thomas, Lynn Bai, James Cox

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

The ongoing Great Recession has triggered numerous proposals to improve the regulation of financial markets and, most importantly, the regulation of organizations such as credit rating agencies, underwriters, hedge funds, and banks, whose behavior is believed to have caused the credit crisis that spawned the economic collapse. Not surprisingly, some of the reform efforts seek to strengthen the use of private litigation . Private suits have long been championed as a necessary mechanism not only to ompensate investors for harms they suffer from financial frauds but also to enhance deterrence of wrongdoing. However, in recent years there has been a …

Consumption, Happiness, And Climate Change, Michael P. Vandenbergh, Mark A. Cohen

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

A large body of literature has developed over the past Jeveral years on the economics of happiness. One of the key insights of this literature is that beyond a subsistence level of income, relative income is often more important than absolute income to individual well-being. This is true for both comparisons against a reference group, e.g., across a community or country, as well as comparisons for the same individual over time. Another key insight is that changes in income have only transitory effects on well-being.

In this Article, we explore the implications of this literature for understanding the relationship between …

The New Cigarette Paternalism, W. Kip Viscusi

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Smoking is by far the largest single risk that most people take. Perhaps in part because of that prominence, smoking has been the target of a wide variety of regulations and legal actions. The controversy over tobacco products is at least four centuries old, but it has been largely over the past half-century that the diverse wave of public policy initiatives against tobacco products has emerged. Within a standard economic framework of consumer choice, there would seem to be little impetus for broadly based government efforts to discourage smoking. The risks of smoking are largely borne by the consumers who …