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Full-Text Articles in Law

Discounting, On Stilts, Douglas A. Kysar Aug 2006

Discounting, On Stilts, Douglas A. Kysar

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

This paper provides a critical overview of several articles presented at the Intergenerational Discounting and Intergenerational Equity Conference held at the University of Chicago Law School on April 27-28, 2006. First, it demonstrates that conventional normative justifications offered for the use of discounting future costs and benefits for policy analysis in the intergenerational context do not withstand scrutiny. Second, it observes that the compensatory transfers that are sometimes thought to sanitize the cost-benefit procedure in the intergenerational context are deeply problematic, both in their theoretical construction and in their practical adequacy for the tasks they are being deployed to accomplish. …


The Problem Of Internalisation Of Social Costs And The Ideas Of Ronald Coase, Enrico Baffi Aug 2006

The Problem Of Internalisation Of Social Costs And The Ideas Of Ronald Coase, Enrico Baffi

enrico baffi

This work examines the influence of Coasian thought on the analysis of externalities as used by economists and legal economists. Ronald Coase, a Chicago scholar, advanced a series of critiques of the Pigovian tax system; the theorem that bears his name is merely the best known. In his 1960 work, he sought to demonstrate that the internationalisation of social costs was not always socially useful. In addition, he identified other institutional solutions to which systems can - and often do - resort. One of these solutions is to simply authorise the harmful activity without introducing mechanisms to internalise social costs. …