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Series

Boston University School of Law

2020

Incentives

Articles 1 - 3 of 3

Full-Text Articles in Law

Indemnifying Precaution: Economic Insights For Regulation Of A Highly Infectious Disease, Christopher Robertson, K Aleks Schaefer, Daniel Scheitrum, Sergio Puig, Keith Joiner May 2020

Indemnifying Precaution: Economic Insights For Regulation Of A Highly Infectious Disease, Christopher Robertson, K Aleks Schaefer, Daniel Scheitrum, Sergio Puig, Keith Joiner

Faculty Scholarship

Economic insights are powerful for understanding the challenge of managing a highly infectious disease, such as COVID-19, through behavioral precautions including social distancing. One problem is a form of moral hazard, which arises when some individuals face less personal risk of harm or bear greater personal costs of taking precautions. Without legal intervention, some individuals will see socially risky behaviors as personally less costly than socially beneficial behaviors, a balance that makes those beneficial behaviors unsustainable. For insights, we review health insurance moral hazard, agricultural infectious disease policy, and deterrence theory, but find that classic enforcement strategies of punishing noncompliant …


Externalities And The Common Owner, Madison Condon Mar 2020

Externalities And The Common Owner, Madison Condon

Faculty Scholarship

Due to the embrace of modern portfolio theory, most of the stock market is controlled by institutional investors holding broadly diversified economy-mirroring portfolios. Recent scholarship has revealed the anti-competitive incentives that arise when a firm’s largest shareholders own similarly sized stakes in the firm’s industry competitors. This Article expands the consideration of the effects of common ownership from the industry level to the market-portfolio level, and argues that diversified investors should rationally be motivated to internalize intra-portfolio negative externalities. This portfolio perspective can explain the increasing climate change related activism of institutional investors, who have applied coordinated shareholder power to …


Antibiotic Development & Economic, Regulatory And Societal Challenges, Kevin Outterson, Christine Årdal, Manica Balasegaram, Ramanan Laxminarayan, David Mcadams, John Rex, Nithima Sumpradit Jan 2020

Antibiotic Development & Economic, Regulatory And Societal Challenges, Kevin Outterson, Christine Årdal, Manica Balasegaram, Ramanan Laxminarayan, David Mcadams, John Rex, Nithima Sumpradit

Faculty Scholarship

Antibiotic resistance is undoubtedly one of the greatest challenges to global health, and the emergence of resistance has outpaced the development of new antibiotics. However, investments by the pharmaceutical industry and biotechnology companies for research into and development of new antibiotics are diminishing. The public health implications of a drying antibiotic pipeline are recognized by policymakers, regulators and many companies. In this Viewpoint article, seven experts discuss the challenges that are contributing to the decline in antibiotic drug discovery and development, and the national and international initiatives aimed at incentivizing research and the development of new antibiotics to improve the …