Law and Economics Commons^™

Reflections On Translating Law And Economic Models For Lawyers And Law Professors, Scott Baker

Scholarship@WashULaw

Written as part of a keynote address for the 20th Annual Asian Law and Economics Conference, these remarks reflect on the way lawyers, judges, and law professors without economic training view and use law and economic models. After revisiting notably successes of classic results from the tort model – results that have penetrated the legal profession – it turns to the translation of more recent models of lawyer argumentation and precedent. Throughout, the point is to demonstrate how model insights can be used to help argue cases and distinguish precedent.

Introducing Justice And Rights To Students Of Economics, Mark D. White

Publications and Research

Most economics instruction is focused on outcomes, whether evaluated in terms of individual or collective welfare or well-being. This is consistent with economics’ roots in classical utilitarianism, and no consideration is usually given to the process by which these results obtain, which is a deontological concern of right and wrong. This can seem odd to economics students, especially in the context of trade-offs in which one party is benefited at the expense of another, or aggregate welfare is maximized while some individuals are harmed, with no consideration in either of rights, desert, or justice. This chapter argues for the importance …

A Proposal For One “Super” Independent Accountability Mechanism, Daniel D. Bradlow

Perspectives

This essay will discuss how the MDBs- for example, the World Bank Group, the African, Asian, and Inter-American Development Banks, and more recently the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, and the New Development Bank – are dealing with the issue of accountability. It will argue that, although the MDBs have been leaders in promoting international organizational accountability, their mechanisms of accountability are not keeping up with the evolution in their operations. In the interests of promoting new and creative thinking about these issues, it will also make an ambitious proposal for how the MDBs jointly …

Too Essential To Fail: Lessons From County Fiscal Crises, Michael A. Francus

Journal Articles

This Article draws out the lessons of counties for municipal finance. To do so, the Article begins by unpacking the municipal finance regulations that have provided counties with extraordinary fiscal safety. The Article then turns to case studies of the eleven counties that either filed for bankruptcy or had state fiscal interventions since the passage of the Bankruptcy Code in 1978. Those case studies show how counties' finances can (in rare cases) go wrong despite well-designed municipal finance regulations. The case studies also show how counties have successfully responded to those crises through bankruptcy and fiscal intervention.

Using that analysis, …

Stakeholder Fairness And Corporate Social Impact: The Behavioral Economic Structure Of Corporate Law, Eli Bukspan

Michigan Business & Entrepreneurial Law Review

This study aims to bridge the gap between stakeholder capitalism—manifesting today in the evolving corporate social impact paradigm—and the historical shareholder primacy of corporate law. The emerging view of corporate purpose, particularly stakeholder capitalism, is closely related to the notion of fairness. This article demonstrates—by looking mainly at Israeli corporate law—that certain foundational concepts of behavioral economics better describe and justify the recent prominence of stakeholderism and the rejuvenated discourse of corporate social impact and purpose than does neoclassical economic theory. It concludes that the “fairness principle” provides a strong rationale for assimilating stakeholder expectations into the DNA of modern …

Intellectual Property, Innovation And Economic Inequality, Daniel Benoliel, Peter K. Yu, Francis Gurry, Keun Lee

Faculty Scholarship

While growing disparities in wealth and income are well-documented across the globe, the role of intellectual property rights is often overlooked. This volume brings together leading commentators from around the world to interrogate the interrelationship between intellectual property and economic inequality. Interdisciplinary and globally oriented by design, the book features economists, legal scholars, policy analysts, and other experts. Chapters address the impact of intellectual property rights on economic inequality, the effect of economic inequality on the protection and enforcement of these rights, and the potential use of innovation law and policy to help reduce economic inequality. The volume also tackles …

Taxation's Limits, Luís C. Calderón Gómez

Northwestern University Law Review

Countless pages have been devoted to the question of why everyone should pay tax, yet its opposite has gone largely unnoticed: why should some people and organizations not pay tax? Our tax system exempts from ordinary income taxation a wide and diverse array of people and organizations engaged in significant economic activity—from parents providing childcare services for their family to consular activities and charities operating animal shelters—seemingly without a convincing explanation. Perhaps because of the dizzying diversity of tax-exempt activities, scholars and policymakers have avoided comprehensively or coherently justifying our exemption regimes.

This Article develops a novel normative theory that …

Selected Indiana Government Statistical Agencies And Their Data, Bert Chapman

Libraries Faculty and Staff Presentations

Provides coverage of Indiana state government agencies statistics and selected Tippecanoe County, Indiana local government statistical publications. Presentation describes state agencies such as the Indiana Departments of Agriculture, Education, Health, Local Government Finance, and State Budget Agency. Examples of historical and current data are presented.

Environmentalism And Antitrust, Albert H. Choi, Daniel A. Crane

Law & Economics Working Papers

In recent years, there has been a proliferation of interest concerning environmental issues and the application of the antitrust laws. Numerous commentators, for instance, have argued that the antitrust enforcement should adjust to reflect the environmental harm (or benefit) that is generated from a competitive condition. In this paper, we take a step back and argue that analysis of the intersection between antitrust and environmentalism should begin with more mundane questions of economics. More specifically, we argue that environmental regulations can inform antitrust analysis by considering (at least) three issues: (1) the impact of environmental regulation on the firms' production …

Selected U.S. Government Statistical Agencies And Their Data, Bert Chapman

Libraries Faculty and Staff Presentations

Provides introductory and detailed overview of U.S. Government agencies statistics. Includes examples of how an individual U.S. law authorizes government agencies to compile statistics for particular congressional committees and the general public. Statistics cover topics such as demography, defense, foreign assistance, economic growth, criminal justice, energy, Social Security, and Medicare.

Can Human Rights Be Reconciled With Citizenship: Reconsidering Marx's Zur Judenfrage Today, David Ingram

Philosophy: Faculty Publications and Other Works

This essay critically re-examines Marx’s youthful analysis of the separation of church and state and his complex views about the function of rights in the modern state. I argue that Marx’s condemnation of Christian nationalism and endorsement of citizenship for Jews is consistent with his view that the modern, secular state cannot emancipate itself entirely from religiosity, as evidenced by the continuing legacy of nationalism and cultural identity politics today. Although Marx correctly follows Hegel in identifying modernity with a structural differentiation between civil society and state, I argue that he misunderstands the nature of this separation and, along with …

Starbucks Workers United And The Future Of American Labor Activism, Sophia Drake Braymen

Honors Projects

This essay explores the goals, motivations, and methods of Starbucks Workers United (the campaign of the labor union Workers United that is aimed at organizing Starbucks employees), as well as the Starbucks Company’s response to it. The analysis is informed by the author’s interviews with both a Workers United organizer and a Starbucks corporate employee. This essay explores the position of Starbucks Workers United within the broader history of American labor activism and our current epoch of union decline, as well as what the recent breakthrough in cooperation between Workers United and Starbucks means for American workers going into the …

Preference Conflict And Peace Studies: The Line Between Disagreement And Violence, Frederic R. Kellogg

Peace and Conflict Studies

Broadening the definition of conflict defines more comprehensively the condition of peace, focusing on how unresolved shared disagreements can lead to, or avoid, polarization and violence. The line between general disagreement and violent conflict lies in the adjustment of shared preferences. Matters like reproductive rights, medically assisted death, race and gender discrimination, while subject to political polarization, are open to peaceful redress through what John Dewey called the transformative continuum of inquiry, in which the crucial social response to shared problems includes dispute and conflict. Resolution of controversial social problems requires preference adjustment and habit change, often, if not always, …

Settler Colonialism And Ecosystem Change: How Ideology Has Shaped Minnesota’S Environments, Sarah E. Hobby

History Honors Projects

The formation of a uniquely American land ethic—defined by European political history and Christian biblical doctrine and forged through systems of dispossession—is central to the creation of environments within the United States today. Using Minnesota as a microcosm to understand how settler colonial interactions played out all across the United States, this paper analyzes connections between violent dispossession of Indigenous people and the degradation of environments. By understanding how Ojibwe and Dakota people think about and have shaped Minnesotan lands throughout their history and comparing Indigenous land-ethics to the Euro-American-settler land ethic, this paper evaluates the role that ideology and …

What Impact Did The Tcja Tax Cuts Have On The Manufacturing Sector?, Ryan Parker

Accounting Undergraduate Honors Theses

Throughout this paper I will examine positive effects the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 had on the manufacturing sector. To do this I begin by outlining the key provisions in the TCJA that directly benefit the manufacturing sector. This includes the corporate tax rate reduction from 35 percent to 21 percent, the changes to the repatriation tax for foreign funds, and the treatment for capital assets. I then analyze key metrics including pre-tax income, income tax provision, dividends, changes in retained earnings, and spending on property plant and equipment. I will show the interactions between the increase in …

How Did The Tax Cuts And Jobs Act Of 2017 Effect Small Businesses?, Jackson Pittman

Accounting Undergraduate Honors Theses

The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) of 2017 marked a significant overhaul of the United States tax system, promising to stimulate economic growth and enhance the competitiveness of American businesses. Amidst its broad-reaching reforms, the TCJA introduced several provisions directly impacting small businesses, aiming to alleviate their tax burdens and foster entrepreneurial activity. This thesis endeavors to evaluate the multifaceted effects of the TCJA on small businesses, examining its implications for their financial performance, investment behavior, and overall economic contribution.

Preliminary findings suggest that the TCJA has produced a generally positive result for small businesses. On one hand, reduced …

De-Escalating The United States-China Trade War Using A Global Conflict Resolution Methodology Framework, Angelina Kapp

Undergraduate Honors Theses

How can the United States and China collaboratively de-escalate their current trade relationship using a conflict resolution methodology to foster economic growth and foreign investor confidence in the evolving landscape of global trade? This paper will serve as a guide to those wanting to gain a comprehensive understanding of the macroeconomic causes and impacts of the contentious trade war between the U.S. and China. The year 2018 can be attributed to the start of the war when then-President Donald Trump implemented tariffs on Chinese goods and products. These back-and-forth financial and economic measures have been continually imposed to this day …

Containerization Of Seafarers In The International Shipping Industry: Contemporary Seamanship, Maritime Social Infrastructures, And Mobility Politics Of Global Logistics, Liang Wu

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation discusses the mobility politics of container shipping and argues that technological development, political-economic order, and social infrastructure co-produce one another. Containerization, the use of standardized containers to carry cargo across modes of transportation that is said to have revolutionized and globalized international trade since the late 1950s, has served to expand and extend the power of international coalitions of states and corporations to control the movements of commodities (shipments) and labor (seafarers). The advent and development of containerization was driven by a sociotechnical imaginary and international social contract of seamless shipping and cargo flows. In practice, this liberal, …

Legal, Policy, And Environmental Scholars Discuss Global Food Systems At Indiana Law Symposium, James Owsley Boyd

Keep Up With the Latest News from the Law School (blog)

The Indiana University Maurer School of Law and its Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies are hosting scholars from around the country Friday and Saturday (Jan. 19-20) for an interdisciplinary discussion on one of the world’s most prevalent problems—food insecurity.

Data from the World Bank estimate more than 780 million people around the world suffered from chronic hunger in 2022. As climate change affects agricultural production and water accessibility, the problem could worsen in coming years.

“A Fragile Framework: How Global Food Systems Intersect with the International Legal Order, the Environment, and the World’s Populations” will bring together legal, policy, …

The Macroprudential Myth, Jeremy C. Kress, Jeffery Yufeng Zhang

Articles

According to conventional wisdom, the 2008 fnancial crisis fundamen- tally changed how policymakers approach fnancial regulation. Before the crisis, regulators sought to prevent individual fnancial institutions from collapsing, but this “microprudential” strategy proved inadequate to stop the market-wide meltdown. In response, policymakers purportedly turned to a new “macroprudential” approach that prioritizes the stability of the fnancial system as a whole instead of individual institutions in isolation. Regulators in the United States and abroad enthusiastically embraced macroprudential policy, implementing stress tests, capital buffers, liquidity requirements, and other supposed macroprudential tools. As the United States’ top bank regulator declared in 2015, “[W]e …

Do The Securities Laws Actually Protect Investors (And How)? Lessons From Spacs, Patrick M. Corrigan

Journal Articles

From the Article

This Article identifies transactional innovation in public offering markets as a case study of how going-public transactions would work if issuers could choose to relax some of the investor protections provided under the securities laws. In recent years, private companies that wanted to go public had a meaningful choice between a traditional initial public offering and a merger with a special purpose acquisition corporation (SPAC). Most of the direct and indirect investor protections that ordinarily apply in the initial public offering context are relaxed in the SPAC context.

The Article argues that outcomes in SPAC markets, where …

Reducing Prescription Drug Prices: How Competition Can Make Medications Affordable For Patients - Testimony Of Rachel E. Sachs, Rachel Sachs

Scholarship@WashULaw

In this testimony, I will explain how existing law both keeps branded drug prices high but has also enabled the development of lower-cost generic and biosimilar competition for branded prescription drugs and biological products. This competition can be used to promote access to affordable prescription drugs, benefiting not only patients but also our public payers. However, I will also explain the ways in which existing legislative and regulatory efforts have not always succeeded in promoting competition and will offer a path forward for this Committee to examine reforms that not only encourage the approval of lower-cost products but also ensure …

Antitrust, Amazon, And Algorithmic Auditing, Jens Frankenreiter, Abhisek Dash, Abhijnan Chakraborty, Saptarshi Ghosh, Animesh Mukherjee, Stefan Bechtold, Krishna P. Gummadi

Scholarship@WashULaw

In digital markets, antitrust law and special regulations aim to ensure that markets remain competitive despite the dominating role that digital platforms play today in everyone's life. Unlike traditional markets, market participant behavior is easily observable in these markets. We present a series of empirical investigations into the extent to which Amazon engages in practices that are typically described as self-preferencing. We discuss how the computer science tools used in this paper can be used in a regulatory environment that is based on algorithmic auditing and requires regulating digital markets at scale.

Corporate Governance Through Social Media, Christina M. Sautter

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

Retail investors and other stakeholders are vigorously and loudly taking positions regarding corporate governance issues on social media. They are gathering on social media to discuss which stocks to invest in and to debate and collectively act on corporate governance-related matters. Propelled by new technologies and social media, retail investor engagement has shifted away from traditional venues like corporate voting and shareholder proposals. Retail investors have opened tens of millions of new brokerage accounts since 2020. These new retail investors, primarily Millennials and GenZ’ers, are adept at using technology and naturally gather and obtain information on social media. A co-author …

Do Americans Support More Housing?, Michael Lewyn

Scholarly Works

An analysis of opinion poll data on housing issues. The article finds that Americans generally believe that their community needs more housing of all types, but are more closely divided about whether such housing should be in their own neighborhoods. The article further finds that members of minority groups, lower-income Americans, and younger Americans are more pro-housing than older, affluent whites.

A Graphic Novel About Housing Policy, Michael Lewyn

Scholarly Works

A review of Build, Baby, Build by Bryan Caplan

Reducing Food Scarcity: The Benefits Of Urban Farming, S.A. Claudell, Emilio Mejia

Journal of Nonprofit Innovation

Urban farming can enhance the lives of communities and help reduce food scarcity. This paper presents a conceptual prototype of an efficient urban farming community that can be scaled for a single apartment building or an entire community across all global geoeconomics regions, including densely populated cities and rural, developing towns and communities. When deployed in coordination with smart crop choices, local farm support, and efficient transportation then the result isn’t just sustainability, but also increasing fresh produce accessibility, optimizing nutritional value, eliminating the use of ‘forever chemicals’, reducing transportation costs, and fostering global environmental benefits.

Imagine Doris, who is …

The Benefits And Challenges To Cycle-Based Adoption Of The International Code Council’S Model Building And Energy Conservation Codes, Hailey M. Mattingly

Commonwealth Policy Papers

This green paper, written in the Commonwealth of Kentucky and applicable to any jurisdictions in the U.S. and abroad, provides policy guidance to state and local authorities that wish to bring their building and energy conservation codes to more current technological and methodological standards. Specifically, this green paper presents the case for cycle-based adoption of model building and energy conservation codes published every three years by the International Code Council (ICC). In doing so, the paper also discusses the numerous benefits and challenges to implementing such a policy.

Congressional Briefing: Increasing Access To Medicare-Funded Physician Residency Slots, Julia Mattingly, Sarah Youngman, Ariel Ringo, Sarah Belcher

Commonwealth Policy Papers

The Fiscal Year (FY) 2022 Inpatient Prospective Payment System (IPPS) final rule designated the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid to implement 1,000 new Medicare-funded physician residency slots to qualifying hospitals authorized by the Consolidated Appropriations Act (CAA) of 2021, phasing in 200 slots per year over five years.However, in its first round of allocation of 200 slots in 2023, only 5 rural hospitals in the country received slots, despite Section 126 of the CAA.

In this brief, we discuss potential solutions to address this allocation shortfall.

A Critical Access Pharmacy Program, Julia Mattingly, Jack Reynolds

Commonwealth Policy Papers

With much light on rural hospital closures and healthcare workforce shortages, a sect of rural healthcare rarely discussed is the availability and accessibility of rural independent pharmacies. Pharmacies are a vital part of healthcare delivery in rural communities, with many not only supplying medications but also offering clinical services such as immunizations, blood pressure and glucose monitoring, medication counseling, and more. As funds are available, Congress should designate the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services to establish a Critical Access Pharmacy Care Program to ensure the sustainability of critical access pharmacies throughout the United States. Specifics of the proposed program …