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Full-Text Articles in Law and Economics

Separation Anxiety: A Cautious Endorsement Of The Independent Board Chair, Lisa Fairfax Jan 2014

Separation Anxiety: A Cautious Endorsement Of The Independent Board Chair, Lisa Fairfax

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This Article critically examines the competing arguments related to splitting the roles of CEO and board chair. Although the campaign for independent board chairs has received increased attention from shareholders and regulators, there has been very little academic analysis of such campaign. This Article seeks to fill this void not only by examining the campaign, but also by assessing its implications in light of the available empirical evidence and normative claims. Based on this assessment, this Article offers two conclusions. First, while there appear to be costs associated with splitting the roles of CEO and board chair, those costs likely …


An Empirical Analysis Of Cost Recovery In Superfund Cases: Implications For Brownfields And Joint And Several Liability, Howard F. Chang, Hilary Sigman Jan 2014

An Empirical Analysis Of Cost Recovery In Superfund Cases: Implications For Brownfields And Joint And Several Liability, Howard F. Chang, Hilary Sigman

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Economic theory developed in the prior literature indicates that under the joint and several liability imposed by the federal Superfund statute, the government should recover more of its costs of cleaning up contaminated sites than it would under nonjoint liability, and the amount recovered should increase with the number of defendants and with the independence among defendants in trial outcomes. We test these predictions empirically using data on outcomes in federal Superfund cases. Theory also suggests that this increase in the amount recovered may discourage the sale and redevelopment of potentially contaminated sites (or “brownfields”). We find the increase to …


Consumer Welfare In Competition And Intellectual Property Law, Herbert J. Hovenkamp Jan 2014

Consumer Welfare In Competition And Intellectual Property Law, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

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Whether antitrust policy should pursue a goal of "general welfare" or "consumer welfare" has been debated for decades. The academic debate is much more varied than the case law, however, which has consistently adopted consumer welfare as a goal, almost never condemning a practice found to produce an actual output reduction or price increase simply because productive efficiency gains accruing to producers exceeded consumer losses.

While some practices such as mergers might produce greater gains in productive efficiency than losses in consumer welfare, identifying such situations would be extraordinarily difficult. First, these efficiencies would have to be "transaction specific," meaning …


Corporate Social Responsibility In A Remedy-Seeking Society: A Public Choice Perspective, Donald J. Kochan Dec 2013

Corporate Social Responsibility In A Remedy-Seeking Society: A Public Choice Perspective, Donald J. Kochan

Donald J. Kochan

Written for the Chapman Law Review Symposium on “What Can Law & Economics Teach Us About the Corporate Social Responsibility Debate?,” this Article applies the lessons of public choice theory to examine corporate social responsibility. The Article adopts a broad definition of corporate social responsibility activism to include both (1) those efforts that seek to convince corporations to voluntarily take into account corporate social responsibility in their own decision-making, and (2) the efforts to alter the legal landscape and expand legal obligations of corporations beyond traditional notions of harm and duty so as to force corporations to invest in interests …