Law Commons^™

The Progressives: Economics, Science, And Race, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

All Faculty Scholarship

This essay is a brief review of Thomas C. Leonard, Illiberal Reformers: Race, Eugenics, and American Economics in the Progressive Era (Princeton Univ. Press 2016).

Free Trade Then And Now, Or Still Manchester United, Maimon Schwarzschild

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

A Framework For A Formal Sovereign Debt Restructuring Mechanism: The Kiss Principle (Keep It Simple, Stupid) And Other Guiding Principles, Charles W. Mooney Jr.

All Faculty Scholarship

Given the ongoing work on a multilateral restructuring process for sovereign debt in the UN, consideration of the content and implementation of a sovereign debt restructuring mechanism (SDRM) is timely. The framework and content of the SDRM proposed here differs from earlier proposals in several important respects. For the classification and supermajority voting of claims in the approval a restructuring plan, it would mimic the structure and operation of the model collective action clauses (Model CACs) proposed by the International Capital Markets Association. Restructuring under a qualified sovereign debt restructuring law (QSDRL) would be guided by four principles: (i) observe …

Economies Of The Internet I: Intersections, Kylie Jarrett, Julia Velkova, Peter Jakobsson, Roderick Graham, David Gehring

Sociology & Criminal Justice Faculty Publications

The internet has increasingly been conceptualized as a space of economic activity. This contemporary imaginary has been particularly influenced by insights from the school of Autonomist Marxism in the foundational work of Tiziana Terranova and through the dominance of Christian Fuchs’ application of Marxist economic concepts. While this has generated great insight into the political economy of the internet, and in particular allowed for the conceptualization of user activity as labor, this approach is only one paradigm for considering the economic activities and implications of the internet. For internet research, there is also the need to move beyond the long …

Behavioral Public Choice And The Law, Gary M. Lucas Jr., Slaviša Tasić

Faculty Scholarship

Behavioral public choice is the study of irrationality among political actors. In this context, irrationality means systematic bias, a deviation from rational expectations, or other departure from economists’ conception of rationality. Behavioral public choice scholars extend the insights of behavioral economics to the political realm and show that irrational behavior is an important source of government failure. This Article makes an original contribution to the legal literature by systematically reviewing the findings of behavioral public choice and explaining their implications for the law and legal institutions. We discuss the various biases and heuristics that lead political actors to support and …

The Developmental Effect Of State Alcohol Prohibitions At The Turn Of The 20th Century, Mary F. Evans, Eric Helland, Jonathan Klick, Ashwin Patel

All Faculty Scholarship

We examine the quasi-randomization of alcohol consumption created by state-level alcohol prohibition laws passed in the U.S. in the early part of the 20th century. Using a large dataset of World War II enlistees, we exploit the differential timing of these laws to examine their effects on adult educational attainment, obesity, and height. We find statistically significant effects for education and obesity that do not appear to be the result of pre-existing trends. Our findings add to the growing body of economic studies that examines the long-run impacts of in utero and childhood environmental conditions.

Can Simple Mechanism Design Results Be Used To Implement The Proportionality Standard In Discovery?, Jonah B. Gelbach

All Faculty Scholarship

I point out that the Coase theorem suggests there should not be wasteful discovery, in the sense that the value to the requester is less than the cost to the responder. I use a toy model to show that a sufficiently informed court could design a mechanism under which the Coasean prediction is borne out. I then suggest that the actual information available to courts is too little to effect this mechanism, and I consider alternatives. In discussing mechanisms intended to avoid wasteful discovery where courts have limited information, I emphasize the role of normative considerations.

Cguppi: Scoring Incentives To Engage In Parallel Accommodating Conduct, Serge Moresi, David Reitman, Steven C. Salop, Yianis Sarafidis

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

We propose an index for scoring coordination incentives, which we call the “coordination GUPPI” or cGUPPI. While the cGUPPI can be applied to a wide range of coordinated effects concerns, it is particularly relevant for gauging concerns of parallel accommodating conduct (PAC), a concept that received due prominence in the 2010 U.S. Horizontal Merger Guidelines. PAC is a type of coordinated conduct whereby a firm raises price with the expectation—but without any prior agreement—that one or more other firms will follow and match the price increase. The cGUPPI is the highest uniform price increase that all the would-be coordinating firms …

California’S Flawed Surface Water Rights, Michael Hanemann, Caitlin Dyckman, Damian Park

Economics

California sprang into existence following the discovery of gold in 1848. Aside from domestic use, the first major use of water in California was in mining. The first mining consisted of placer mining of alluvial deposits in stream beds throughout the Sierra foothills. As those deposits were depleted, hydraulic mining arose, in which high-pressure jets of water were used to remove overlying earth from upland gold- bearing deposits. That type of mining, first employed in 1853, required substantial water diversions.

When California entered the Union in 1850, the English common law was adopted as the “rule of decision” in courts, …

Institutional Investors In Corporate Governance, Edward B. Rock

All Faculty Scholarship

This chapter of the Oxford Handbook on Corporate Law and Governance examines the role of institutional investors in corporate governance and the role of regulation in encouraging institutional investors to become active stewards. I approach these topics through asking what lessons we can draw from the U.S. experience for the E.U.’s 2014 proposed amendments to the Shareholder Rights Directive.

I begin by defining the institutional investor category, and summarizing the growth of institutional investors’ equity holdings over time. I then briefly survey how institutional investors themselves are governed and how they organize share voting. This leads me to two central …

Medicare Secondary Payer And Settlement Delay, Eric Helland, Jonathan Klick

All Faculty Scholarship

The Medicare Secondary Payer Act of 1980 and its subsequent amendments require that insurers and self-insured companies report settlements, awards, and judgments that involve a Medicare beneficiary to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. The parties then may be required to compensate CMS for its conditional payments. In a simple settlement model, this makes settlement less likely. Also, the reporting delays and uncertainty regarding the size of these conditional payments are likely to further frustrate the settlement process. We provide results, using data from a large insurer, showing that, on average, implementation of the MSP reporting amendments led to …

The Effect Of Health Insurance On Workers' Compensation Filing: Evidence From The Affordable Care Act's Age-Based Threshold For Dependent Coverage, Marcus O. Dillender

Upjohn Institute Working Papers

This paper identifies the effect of health insurance on workers' compensation (WC) filing for young adults by implementing a regression discontinuity design using WC medical claims data from Texas. The results suggest health insurance factors into the decision to have WC pay for discretionary care. The implied instrumental variables estimates suggest a 10 percentage point decrease in health insurance coverage increases WC bills by 15.3 percent. Despite the large impact of health insurance on the number of WC bills, the additional cost to WC at age 26 appears to be small as most of the increase comes from small bills.

Inference Under Stability Of Risk Preferences, Levon Barseghyan, Francesca Molinari, Joshua C. Teitelbaum

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

We leverage the assumption that preferences are stable across contexts to partially identify and conduct inference on the parameters of a structural model of risky choice. Working with data on households' deductible choices across three lines of insurance coverage and a model that nests expected utility theory plus a range of non-expected utility models, we perform a revealed preference analysis that yields household-specific bounds on the model parameters. We then impose stability and other structural assumptions to tighten the bounds, and we explore what we can learn about households' risk preferences from the intervals defined by the bounds. We further …

Right-To-Work:' The Issue That Won't Die — A Historical Perspective, Charles A. Scontras

Bureau of Labor Education

Phoenix-like, "right-to-work" measures have again surfaced in the state Legislature. Such measures are designed to prohibit employers from negotiating union security clauses by which all who benefit from union bargaining agreements pay their share of the costs involved in the union's legal obligation to represent all workers.

The New Synthesis Of Bank Regulation And Bankruptcy In The Dodd-Frank Era, David A. Skeel Jr.

All Faculty Scholarship

Since the enactment of the Dodd-Frank Act in 2010, U.S. bank regulation and bankruptcy have become far more closely intertwined. In this Article, I ask whether the new synthesis of bank regulation and bankruptcy is coherent, and whether it is likely to prove effective.

I begin by exploring some of the basic differences between bank resolution, which is a highly administrative process in the U.S., and bankruptcy, which relies more on courts and the parties themselves. I then focus on a series of remarkable new innovations designed to facilitate the rapid recapitalization of systemically important financial institutions: convertible contingent capital …

The Federal Reserve And A Cascade Of Failures: Inequality, Cognitive Narrowness And Financial Network Theory, Emma Coleman Jordan

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The recent financial crisis hollowed out the core of American middle-class financial stability. In the wake of the financial crisis, household net worth in the U.S. fell by 24%, for a loss of $16 trillion. Moreover, retirement accounts, the largest class of financial assets, took a steep drop in value, as did house prices, and these two classes of assets alone represent approximately 43% of all household wealth. The losses during the principal crisis years, 2007–2009, were devastating, “erasing almost two decades of accumulated prosperity,” in the words of a 2013 report. By the Federal Reserve. Beyond these direct household …

Investing And Pretending, Anita Krug

All Faculty Scholarship

One of the more prominent components of Dodd–Frank’s regulatory changes was Title VII, providing for the regulation of the over-the-counter derivatives known as “swaps.” A swap is a financial instrument whose value is based on an asset—the “reference asset”—that is wholly unrelated to the swap itself. Although there was much ado about swap regulation immediately after Dodd–Frank’s enactment, the same cannot be said of the many rules that the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (“CFTC”) has subsequently adopted pursuant to its authority under Title VII. This Article critically evaluates the CFTC’s “swap rules” and identifies the regulatory vision that they reflect. …

Improving Rhode Island’S Health Care System: Lessons From The Cuban Model, Sarah R. Moffitt

Senior Honors Projects

Improving Rhode Island’s health care system: lessons from the Cuban model

Cuba is world renowned for its health care system. In regards to international health crises, Cuba is a leader in sending workers abroad and training doctors from all over the world. Within its own borders, the Cuban model provides free access to all citizens in which every individual has a primary care provider. Cuba boasts high vaccination rates, a long life expectancy, low infant mortality rate, and a population that is one of the healthiest in the western hemisphere.

The purpose of this research project is to evaluate the …

Cloud Computing, Contractibility, And Network Architecture, Christopher S. Yoo

All Faculty Scholarship

The emergence of the cloud is heightening the demands on the network in terms of bandwidth, ubiquity, reliability, latency, and route control. Unfortunately, the current architecture was not designed to offer full support for all of these services or to permit money to flow through it. Instead of modifying or adding specific services, the architecture could redesigned to make Internet services contractible by making the relevant information associated with these services both observable and verifiable. Indeed, several on-going research programs are exploring such strategies, including the NSF’s NEBULA, eXpressive Internet Architecture (XIA), ChoiceNet, and the IEEE’s Intercloud projects.

Health Care Services And Profits: A Conflict Of Interest?, Carolyn Plump Jd, Jennifer Sipe Msn, Rn

Explorer Café

No abstract provided.

Rediscovering Capture: Antitrust Federalism And The North Carolina Dental Case, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

All Faculty Scholarship

This brief essay analyzes the Supreme Court's 2015 decision in the North Carolina Dental case, assessing its implications for federalism. The decision promises to re-open old divisions that had once made the antitrust "state action" doctrine a controversial lightning rod for debate about state economic sovereignty.

One provocative issue that neither the majority nor the dissenters considered is indicated by the fact that nearly all the cartel customers in the Dental case were located within the state. By contrast, the cartel in Parker v. Brown, which the dissent held up as the correct exemplar of the doctrine, benefited California growers …

Real Arrow-Securities For All: Just And Efficient Insurance Through Macro-Hedging, Robert C. Hockett

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

As a new hurricane season opened in June of 2006, it emerged that a number of online gaming sites were offering bettors the opportunity to wager on whether New Orleans might suffer another Katrina calamity. Commentators condemned the announced practice with howls of disgust, labeling it both tasteless and heartless. Perhaps they were right. All I could think about as one who grew up in New Orleans, however, was how risk pools might hereby be broadened to include all the world’s bettors. We shouldn’t condemn these people; we should use them—while requiring that they maintain margin accounts at their betting …

Are They Worth Reading? An In-Depth Analysis Of Online Trackers’ Privacy Policies, Candice Hoke, Lorrie Faith Cranor, Pedro Giovanni Leon, Alyssa Au

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

We analyzed the privacy policies of 75 online tracking companies with the goal of assessing whether they contain information relevant for users to make privacy decisions. We compared privacy policies from large companies, companies that are members of self-regulatory organizations, and nonmember companies and found that many of them are silent with regard to important consumer-relevant practices including the collection and use of sensitive information and linkage of tracking data with personally-identifiable information. We evaluated these policies against self-regulatory guidelines and found that many policies are not fully compliant. Furthermore, the overly general requirements established in those guidelines allow companies …

Predatory Pricing Under The Areeda-Turner Test, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

All Faculty Scholarship

Few works of legal scholarship have had the impact enjoyed by Areeda and Turner's 1975 article on predatory pricing. Proof of predatory pricing under the Areeda-Turner test requires two things. The plaintiff must show a market structure such that the predator could rationally foresee "recouping the losses through higher profits earned in the absence of competition." This requirement, typically called "recoupment," requires the plaintiff to show that, looking from the beginning of the predation campaign, the predator can reasonably anticipate that the costs of predation will be more than offset by the present value of a future period of monopoly …

Mega-Regional Trade, Joshua Meltzer

Brookings Scholar Lecture Series

This lecture will discuss the impact of the Trans Pacific Partnership negotiations and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership negotiations on U.S. economic competitiveness and leadership in Asia and Europe. This will lead into a discussion of large Free Trade Areas (FTA), or groups of countries that have few or no price controls in the form of tariffs or quotas between each other. FTAs allow the agreeing nations to focus on their comparative advantages and to produce the goods they are comparatively more efficient at making, thus increasing the efficiency and profitability of each country. We will explore the impact …

Slides: Practicing Sustainability In Natural Resource Industries, Gary D. Libecap

Natural Resource Industries and the Sustainability Challenge (Martz Winter Symposium, February 27-28)

Presenter: Gary D. Libecap, Bren School of Environmental Science and Management and Economics Department, University of California, Santa Barbara, National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER)

10 slides

Getting The Most Out Of Your 401(K), Emily G. Brown Jd, Jeanne Medeiros Jd

Pension Action Center Publications

Planning for your retirement is an active and ongoing endeavor. It requires a certain amount of diligence and knowledge to ensure you have an adequate amount of financial stability at retirement. In order to safeguard your economic security, it is important to know if you are getting the most out of your 401(k) retirement savings account. This factsheet provides basic information about enrolling in a 401(k) retirement savings account and important items to keep in mind once you are enrolled.

Waste And Duplication In Nasa Programs: The Need To Enhance U.S. Space Program Efficiency, Bert Chapman

Libraries Faculty and Staff Scholarship and Research

The U.S. Government faces acute budgetary deficits and national debt problems in the Obama Administration. These problems have been brought about by decades of unsustainable government spending affecting all agencies including the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. (NASA). An outgrowth of this fiscal profligacy is the presence of wasteful and duplicative programs within NASA that prevent this agency from achieving its space science and human spaceflight objectives. These problems occur due to mismanagement of these programs from NASA and the creation of these programs by the U.S. Congress and congressional committees. This occurs because congressional appropriators tend to be more …

The Impact Of Affirmative Action On The Employment Of Minorities And Women Over Three Decades: 1973-2003, Fidan Ana Kurtulus

Upjohn Institute Working Papers

What role has affirmative action played in the growth of minority and female employment in U.S. firms? This paper analyzes this issue by comparing the employment of minorities and women at firms holding federal contracts and therefore mandated to implement affirmative action, and at noncontracting firms, over the course of three decades spanning 1973–2003. It constitutes the first study to comprehensively document the long-term impact of affirmative action in federal contracting on the U.S. employment landscape. The study uses a new panel data set of over 100,000 large private-sector firms across all industries and regions, obtained from the U.S. Equal …

Do I Have To Cross The Picket Line?, Bureau Of Labor Education. University Of Maine

Bureau of Labor Education

Refusing to cross a lawfully established picket line is protected by the National Labor Relations Act. You have the legal right not to cross a picket line in solidarity with your own union, out of sympathy for workers from another union, or just to avoid confrontation. By refusing to cross a picket line while on duty you are essentially engaging in a strike in sympathy with the picketing workers. Refusing to cross a picket line is a legally protected act. When you approach a picket line you may be asked to honor the picket line. Politely asking someone not to …