Law Commons^™

Deepwater Drilling: Law, Policy, And Economics Of Firm Organization And Safety, Mark A. Cohen

Vanderbilt Law Review

Nathan Richardson 64 Vand. L. Rev. 1853 (2011) Although the causes of the Deepwater Horizon spill are not yet conclusively identified, significant attention has focused on the safety-related policies and practices-often referred to as the safety culture-of BP and other firms involved in drilling the well. This Article defines and characterizes the economic and policy forces that affect safety culture and identifies reasons why those forces may or may not be adequate or effective from the public's perspective. Two potential justifications for policy intervention are that: (1) not all of the social costs of a spill may be internalized by …

Economics, Politics, And The International Principles For Sound Compensation Practices: An Analysis Of Executive Pay At European Banks, Guido Ferrarini, Maria C. Ungureanu

Vanderbilt Law Review

In this Article, we submit that the compensation structures at banks before the financial crisis were not necessarily flawed and that recent reforms in this area largely reflect already existing best practices. In Part I we review recent empirical studies on corporate governance and executive pay at banks and suggest that there is no strong support for regulating bankers' compensation structures. We also argue that detailed regulation of incentives would subtract essential decisionmaking powers from boards of directors and make compensation structures too rigid.

In Part II we note that political support for regulating bankers' pay has been strong and …

Amicus Briefs And The Sherman Act: Why Antitrust Needs A New Deal, Rebecca Haw Allensworth

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Power to interpret the Sherman Act, and thus power to make broad changes to antitrust policy, is currently vested in the Supreme Court. But reevaluation of existing competition rules requires economic evidence, which the Court cannot gather on its own, and technical economic savvy, which it lacks. To compensate for these deficiencies, the Court has turned to amicus briefs to supply the economic information and reasoning behind its recent changes to antitrust policy. This Article argues that such reliance on amicus briefs makes Supreme Court antitrust adjudication analogous to administrative notice-and-comment rulemaking. When the Court pays careful attention to economic …