Law and Economics Commons^™

Banking The Poor: Policies To Bring Low-Income Americans Into The Financial Mainstream, Michael S. Barr

Law & Economics Working Papers Archive: 2003-2009

Low-income households in the United States often lack access to bank accounts and face high costs for conducting basic financial transactions through check cashers and other alternative financial service providers. These families find it more difficult to save and plan financially for the future. Living paycheck to paycheck leaves them vulnerable to medical or job emergencies that may endanger their financial stability, and lack of longer-term savings undermines their ability to improve skills, purchase a home, or send their children to college. High-cost financial services and inadequate access to bank accounts may undermine widely-shared societal goals of reducing poverty, moving …

Good Faith In The Cisg: Interpretation Problems In Article 7, Benedict C. Sheehy

ExpressO

ABSTRACT: This article examines the dispute concerning the meaning of Good Faith in the CISG. Although there are good reasons for arguing a more limited interpretation or more limited application of Good Faith, there are also good reasons for a broader approach. Regardless of the correct interpretation, however, practitioners and academics need to have a sense of where the actual jurisprudence is going. This article reviews every published case on Article 7 since its inception and concludes that while there is little to suggest a strong pattern is developing, a guided pattern while incorrect doctrinally is preferable to the current …

On The Misuse Of The Nash Bargaining Solution In Law And Economics, Abraham L. Wickelgren

ExpressO

Bargaining plays a very important role in a great deal of legal scholarship, particularly in law and economics scholarship. Scholars often assume that the Nash bargaining solution determines the bargaining outcome, where the parties equally split the joint benefit created by the agreement. This solution, however, is inappropriate when parties have outside options, alternatives that only provide a payoff if the bargainer terminates the original bargaining. Most legal bargaining problems involve outside options. This article explains why the Nash bargaining solution generates an inappropriate outcome in this situation. Then, it examines several different prior articles that have used the Nash …

“Politics As Markets” Reconsidered: Economic Theory, Competitive Democracy And Primary Ballot Access , David N. Schleicher

ExpressO

No abstract provided.

Modern Bootlegging And The Prohibition On Fair Prices: Last Call For The Repeal Of Pharmaceutical Price Gouging, Luke W. Cleland

ExpressO

This article discusses the recent passage of the Medicare Prescription Drug, Modernization and Improvement Act of 2003, and the executive and judicial decisions affecting the ability of the general public to access foreign pharmaceutical markets. The article examines the recent actions taken by the U.S. government, explore various state movements within the United States aimed at reducing pharmaceutical drug prices, outline the process of pharmaceutical drug prices in foreign countries, and advocate for a workable integration of all available mechanisms to feasibly reduce prescription drug prices for the benefit of both U.S. consumers and U.S. drug companies. As avenues to …

Extraterritoriality Of The Sherman Act And Deterrence Of Private International Cartels, John M. Connor

ExpressO

This paper argues that the facts in the vitamins cartel support decisions in the 2nd and DC circuits to permit wholly foreign direct buyers of globally cartelized products standing to sue in U.S. courts. Such an interpretation of the Sherman Act is justified by conduct that is essentially linked to the management of successful international cartels, namely, the prevention of geographic arbitrage. This paper shows that the degree of injuries imposed on U.S. consumers could not have occurred were it not for coordinated price increases in countries with weak or nonexistent anticartel laws. Moreover, this paper endeavors to demonstrate that, …

Assessing The Options For Designing A Mandatory U.S. Greenhouse Gas Reduction Program, Robert R. Nordhaus, Kyle W. Danish

ExpressO

The United States faces growing pressure – both from domestic and international sources – to adopt a mandatory greenhouse gas reduction program to address the risk of global climate change. If policy-makers decide to establish such a program, they could end up creating an environmental regulatory regime of potentially unprecedented scope and impacts. A domestic greenhouse gas program could break ground in other ways too. Many policy-makers are considering innovative market-based approaches to regulation, including a multi-billion dollar economy-wide “cap-and-trade” program. In this paper, we: (1) set forth criteria for evaluating program options; (2) analyze the leading design options and …

Securing Truth For Power: Informational Strategy And Regulatory Policy Making, Cary Coglianese

ExpressO

No abstract provided.

What Is Fiscal Responsibility? Long-Term Deficits, Generational Accounting, And Capital Budgeting, Neil H. Buchanan

Rutgers Law School (Newark) Faculty Papers

This article assesses three basic approaches to assessing the future effects of the government’s fiscal policies: traditional measures of the deficit, measures associated with Generational Accounting, and measures derived from applying Capital Budgeting to the federal accounts. I conclude that Capital Budgeting is the best of the three approaches and that Generational Accounting is the least helpful. Acknowledging that there might be some value in learning what we can from a variety of approaches to analyzing fiscal policy, I nevertheless conclude that Generational Accounting is actually a misleading or--at best--empty measure of future fiscal developments. The best approach to providing …

Insights From Economics, Jennifer Gerarda Brown

Journal of Legal Education

No abstract provided.

Banking The Poor, Michael S. Barr

Law & Economics Working Papers Archive: 2003-2009

Low-income households often lack access to banking accounts and face high costs for transacting basic financial services through check cashers and other alternative financial service providers. These families find it more difficult to save and plan financially for the future. Living paycheck to paycheck leaves them vulnerable to medical or job emergencies that may endanger their financial stability, and lack of longer-term savings undermines their ability to improve skills, purchase a home, or send their children to college. Additionally, high cost financial services and inadequate access to bank accounts may undermine widely-shared societal goals of reducing poverty, moving families from …

Credible Coercion, Oren Bar-Gill, Omri Ben-Shahar

Law & Economics Working Papers Archive: 2003-2009

The ideal of individual liberty and autonomy requires that society provide relief against coercion. In the law, this requirement is often translated into rules that operate “post-coercion” to undo the legal consequences of acts and promises extracted under duress. This Article argues that these ex-post anti-duress measures, rather than helping the coerced party, might in fact hurt her. When coercion is credible—when a credible threat to inflict an even worse outcome underlies the surrender of the coerced party—ex post relief will only induce the strong party to execute the threatened outcome, to the detriment of the coerced party. Anti-duress relief …

"Agreeing To Disagree": Filling Gaps In Deliberately Incomplete Contracts, Omri Ben-Shahar

Law & Economics Working Papers Archive: 2003-2009

This Article develops a new standard for gap filling in incomplete contracts. It focuses on an important class of situations in which parties leave their agreement deliberately incomplete, with the intent to further negotiate and resolve the remaining issues. In these situations, neither the traditional no-enforcement result nor the usual gap filling approaches accord with the parties’ partial consent. Instead, the Article develops the concept of pro-defendant gap-fillers, under which each party is granted an option to enforce the transaction supplemented with terms most favorable (within reason) to the other party. A deliberately incomplete contract with pro-defendant gap fillers transforms …

Models In Social Science: A Review Of Law And Public Policy: A Socioeconomic Approach, Kenneth G. Dau-Schmidt

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

Nietzsche In Law's Cathedral: Beyond Reason And Postmodernism, John Linarelli

Scholarly Works

Nietzsche had very little to say about law and what he did say is fragmentary and sporadic. Nietzsche's philosophy, however, offers a basis for theorizing about law. I use Nietzsche's important works to interpret two major movements in legal thought. The first part of the paper examines how Nietzsche's philosophy augments our understanding of deontological theories about the law. Nietzsche produced a substantial ethical theory. The second part of the paper examines how Nietzsche's philosophy helps us to understand law and economics. Nietzsche had a great deal to say about the intellectual predecessor to law and economics, utilitarianism, and his …

Valuation Averaging: A New Procedure For Resolving Valuation Disputes, Keith Sharfman

Rutgers Law School (Newark) Faculty Papers

In this Article, Professor Sharfman addresses the problem of "discretionary valuation": that courts resolve valuation disputes arbitrarily and unpredictably, thus harming litigants and society. As a solution, he proposes the enactment of "valuation averaging," a new procedure for resolving valuation disputes modeled on the algorithmic valuation processes often agreed to by sophisticated private firms in advance of any dispute. He argues that by replacing the discretion of judges and juries with a mechanical valuation process, valuation averaging would cause litigants to introduce more plausible and conciliatory valuations into evidence and thereby reduce the cost of valuation litigation and increase the …

The Situation: An Introduction To The Situational Character, Critical Realism, Power Economics, And Deep Capture, Jon Hanson, David Yosifon

Faculty Publications

Throughout most of this introductory Article, we will focus our arguments primarily on economics and law and economics. We believe, however, that the implications of our inquiry extend far beyond those domains. The tendencies we hope to elucidate find their origins in the human animal, not in any particular legal theoretic perspective. It happens that these tendencies are especially prominent in law and economics, currently the dominant theoretical paradigm for creating and analyzing legal policy. But the relevance of our thesis is not confined to one approach , or even to legal-political questions. All humans are more or less implicated, …

Social Security Reform: An Expository Report, Nathan J. Voss

Honors Capstones

Capstone submitted as a graduation requirement for the BSU Honors Program.

The Uncertain Psychological Case For Paternalism, Jeffrey J. Rachlinski

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

The Diaspora Of Ethnic Economies: Beyond The Pale?, Lan Cao

William & Mary Law Review

No abstract provided.

Behavioral Economics And The Sec, Stephen Choi, Adam C. Pritchard

Law & Economics Working Papers Archive: 2003-2009

Investors face myriad investment alternatives and seemingly limitless information concerning those alternatives.Not surprisingly, many commentators contend that investors frequently fall short of the ideal investor posited by the rational actor model. Investors are plagued with a variety of behavioral biases (such as, among others, the hindsight bias, the availability bias, loss aversion, and overconfidence). Even securities market institutions and intermediaries may suffer from biases, led astray by groupthink and overconfidence. The question remains whether regulators should focus on such biases in formulating policy. An omnipotent regulatory decisionmaker would certainly improve on flawed investor decisionmaking. The alternative we face, however, is …

Of Legal Transplants, Legal Irritants, And Economic Development, Katharina Pistor, Daniel Berkowitz

Faculty Scholarship

The collapse of the socialist system has given way to unprecedented economic and legal reforms in the former socialist countries. Over the past decade they have enacted new legislation in all areas of the law, drawing heavily on legal models from developed market economies, including common law and civil law countries. While the transplanted laws now on the books is largely consistent with Western practice, the enforcement of these new laws is often ineffective (Berkowitz, Pistor, and Richard, 2003).

Regionalism Versus Globalism: A View From The Americas, Carlos Manuel Vázquez

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The well-deserved celebration of UNIDROIT'S first seventy-five years focused on a topic that is of particular interest to the Organization of American States and to the organ of the OAS to which the author belongs, the Inter-American Juridical Committee. The topic of the 75th Anniversary Congress--"Worldwide Harmonization of Private Law and Regional Integration"--implicates one of the several dichotomies with which we in the Inter-American system who work on questions of private international law (and international private law) have been grappling in recent years, the problem of regional versus global approaches to the harmonization of private international law (and international private …

On The Proper Motives Of Corporate Directors (Or, Why You Don't Want To Invite Homo Economicus To Join Your Board), Lynn A. Stout

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

One of the most important questions in corporate governance is how directors of public corporations can be motivated to serve the interests of the firm. Directors frequently hold only small stakes in the companies they manage. Moreover, a variety of legal rules and contractual arrangements insulate them from liability for business failures. Why then should we expect them to do a good job?

Conventional corporate scholarship has great difficulty wrestling with this question, in large part because conventional scholarship usually adopts the economist's assumption that directors are rational actors motivated purely by self-interest. This homo economicus model of behavior may …

Efficiency And Social Citizenship: Challenging The Neoliberal Attack On The Welfare State, Martha T. Mccluskey

Journal Articles

In the face of rising economic inequality and shrinking welfare protections, some scholars recently have revived interest in T.H. Marshall's theory of "social citizenship." That theory places economic rights alongside political and civil rights as fundamental to public well-being. But this social citizenship ideal stands against the prevailing neoliberal ("free market") ideology, which asserts that state abstention from economic protection generates societal well-being. Using the examples of AFDC and workers' compensation in the 1990s, I analyze how arguments about economic efficiency have worked to characterize social welfare programs as producers of public vice rather than public virtue. A close examination …

“Head Start Works Because We Do”: Head Start Programs, Community Action Agencies, And The Struggle Over Unionization, Eloise Pasachoff

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In the summer of 2002, the city of Boston watched a fierce battle unfold between low-wage workers who provide child care and the social service agencies that employ them. Boston requires its city contractors to pay more than twice the federal minimum wage of $5.15 an hour to their employees, according to the terms of the city's "living wage" ordinance. The social service agencies, which receive government subsidies to run their child care programs, claimed that they could not afford to pay this rate. These agencies mounted an intense legal and political campaign, arguing that they would be forced to …

Gary Minda's Boycott In America: How Imagination And Ideology Shape The Legal Mind, Robert J. Steinfeld

Book Reviews

No abstract provided.

The Elementary Economics Of Bijuralism: A First Cut, James W. Bowers

Journal of Legal Education

No abstract provided.

Trade And Poverty In The Poor Countries, Jagdish N. Bhagwati, T.N. Srinivasan

Faculty Scholarship

While freer trade, or “openness” in trade, is now widely regarded as economically benign, in the sense that it increases the size of the pie, the recent anti-globalization critics have suggested that it is socially malign on several dimensions, among them the question of poverty.

Their contention is that trade accentuates, not ameliorates, and that it deepens, not diminishes, poverty in both the rich and the poor countries. The theoretical and empirical analysis of the impact of freer trade on poverty in the rich and in the poor countries is not symmetric, of course. We focus here only on the …

Mixed Signals: Rational-Choice Theories Of Social Norms And The Pragmatics Of Explanation, W. Bradley Wendel

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

The question of how societies secure cooperation and order in the absence of state enforced sanctions has long vexed law and economics scholars. Recently the concept of social norms--informally enforced rules of behavior--has occupied the attention of a large number of these theorists, who are concerned with understanding why economically rational actors would bother to follow rules whose costs seem to outweigh their benefits. Because of the prestige (or at least trendiness) of law and economics, it seems that now everyone in the legal academy is talking about social norms. This burgeoning scholarship is closely related to a wider concern …