Law and Economics Commons^™

Resiliency Planning And The Reorganization Of Legal Authority In Rural Maine, Nicholas F. Jacobs, Skylar Thielbar

Maine Law Review

Resiliency has become a dominant and largely unchallenged organizing principle of contemporary state-local governance in Maine, particularly as it affects rural towns and communities dependent on extractive industries. This Article argues that resiliency planning is not merely a policy orientation, but a distinct form of legal authority, which operates through an administrative structure that is closed off to normal channels of political accountability and judicial review. Focusing on Maine, the Article shows how statewide resiliency planning reallocates authority across state and local institutions, shaping fiscal access and territorial development without triggering the doctrinal safeguards of public law. Rural governance, where …

Reporting Materiality Under The Sec Cybersecurity Disclosure Rules: How Corporate Boards Balance Duty And Risk For Cyber Threats And Incidents, Deborah Slattery-Pereira

American University Business Law Review

The Security Exchange Commission’s (SEC) cybersecurity rules require that public companies disclose a material cyber threat or incident and the impact of the incident on the company’s business Corporate boards must disclose any cyber-related information that would affect a reasonable shareholder’s investment decisions. These rules delegate to the corporate board and management the decision of which cybersecurity events qualify as material to investors. Directors and officers must also decide when and how to disclose to the SEC, and what information to report.

The SEC Cybersecurity Rules increase compliance and litigation costs for public companies, as shareholders can use this information …

Professor Cindy Williams Joins Global Future Councils At The World Economic Forum In Dubai, Maurer School Of Law - Indiana University

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

Indiana University Maurer School of Law Professor Cindy Williams is representing the school this week at the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Councils (GFC) Annual Meeting in Dubai.

As a member of the GFC on Climate Change and Nature Loss, Professor Williams is contributing to discussions that frame environmental challenges as key financial risks and opportunities for companies. Her work focuses on how innovative finance can be harnessed to restore nature and build economic resilience worldwide.

Controlling Private Economic Power: Lessons Learned From The Us Experience In The First Decades Of The 20th Century, Thierry Kirat, Frédéric Marty

Yearbook of Antitrust and Regulatory Studies

Concerns related to Big Techs have led to a proliferation of legislative initiatives to complete competition rules with regulatory devices that would lead gatekeepers to be subject to obligations to preserve an equality of opportunities on the market. Within this context, this contribution revisits American decision-making practice from the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century to show how regulatory-type interventions and the enforcement of competition rules have been activated to control the strategies of firms acting as gatekeepers. What we can learn from this experience is that a big firm having private regulatory power …

Ai Regulation: Competition, Arbitrage & Regulatory Capture, Filippo Lancieri, Laura Edelson, Stefan Bechtold

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The commercial launch of ChatGPT in November 2022 and the fast development of large language models have catapulted the regulation of artificial intelligence to the forefront of policy debates. A vast body of scholarship, white papers, and other policy analyses followed, outlining ideal regulatory regimes for AI. The European Union and other jurisdictions have moved forward by regulating AI and LLMs. One overlooked area is the political economy of these regulatory initiatives—or how countries and companies can behave strategically and use different regulatory levers to protect their interests in the international competition on how to regulate AI.

This Article helps …

Moral Panic Or Public Health Crisis? Lessons From Drugs And Gambling For “Addictive” Design, Matthew B. Lawrence, Haomin (Kevin) Yan

Seattle University Law Review

Alcohol, automobiles, guns, lottery, loot boxes, meat, music, opioid painkillers, processed foods, prop bets, slot machines, television, tobacco, violent video games. Over the last century each of these has been subject to concerns—some might even say “moral panics”—from parents and policymakers about avoidable harms to kids and adults. In some cases we look back with the benefit of hindsight and dismiss those concerns as naïve or moralistic. In others we look back at them as justified or as having come too late to check an expanding industry before it did unfathomable harm while growing so powerful that it became all …

Let The Sunshine In: Crafting Constitutional Transparency Regulations For Content Moderation, Caitlin Ring Carlson

Seattle University Law Review

In response to public concern about the impact of social media, legislators in some U.S. states have developed laws to regulate the process of content moderation. Many include mandatory transparency and disclosure requirements, some of which courts have already deemed an unconstitutional infringement on social media platforms’ right to free expression. This article explores the parameters for crafting constitutional social media transparency regulations using existing U.S. media policy and insights from recent legal challenges. The resulting analysis identifies content neutral transparency requirements that mandate the disclosure of purely factual, non-controversial information as those most likely to withstand judicial scrutiny. Specifically, …

This Is Not A Game: The Addictive Allure Of Digital Companions, Nizan Geslevich Packin, Karni Chagal-Feferkorn

Seattle University Law Review

Artificial Intelligence (AI) agents have become an inescapable part of modern childhood, reshaping education, leisure activities, entertainment, and social interaction. From AI-powered tutors that adapt to individual learning styles to emotionally responsive chatbots that simulate human companionship, these systems promise unprecedented personalization, cognitive stimulation, and social support. However, these benefits mask significant risks that remain unregulated and inadequately addressed.

Although adults are also susceptible to forming deep emotional bonds with AI companions—often trusting them as if they possessed genuine understanding and empathy—children are particularly vulnerable. Their misplaced trust can more severely distort social development, weaken critical thinking, and foster unhealthy …

How Active Cftc Enforcement Could Benefit Crypto, Carol R. Goforth

Pace Law Review

Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) crypto enforcement rose to record levels in 2023, prompting applause from some observers and criticism from others. In fact, the CFTC’s enforcement agenda is not out of step with other federal agencies such as the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), which has also been incredibly active in the crypto industry. It might seem that this is bad news for crypto, given that both the CFTC and SEC have been angling to become the primary regulator for these new assets. In reality, proof that the CFTC is active in enforcing the law against crypto entrepreneurs and …

Third-Party Funding In Treaty-Based Arbitration: Towards A More Transparent And Responsible System?, Margie-Lys Jaime R.

Arbitration Brief

Third-Party Funding (“TPF”) has become the “new kid on the block” of long-established stakeholders in international arbitration. However, despite the increasing use of TPF, few countries have undertaken the task of regulating the intervention of funders. Even in countries where the practice of TPF is regulated, it is generally in codes of conduct or non-binding instruments.

Does Climate Disclosure Work To Reduce Greenhouse Gas Emissions? Emerging Evidence Suggests Cautious Optimism, Cynthia A. Williams

Seattle University Law Review

Significant regulatory resources have been spent developing global, voluntary climate and sustainability disclosure standards, such as the TCFD, TNRD, and ISSB’s Sustainability and Climate Disclosure standards, or domestically required disclosures, such as in the EU and in the U.S. Thus, it is important to evaluate whether this disclosure, particularly voluntary, qualitative disclosure, will have the power to shift the allocation of capital, will have a significant effect on the management of climate risk within firms, and ultimately will reduce climate change risk and biodiversity loss.

In this Article, several interrelated questions will be discussed. First, what does the empirical evidence …

The False Choice Between Digital Regulation And Innovation, Anu Bradford

Northwestern University Law Review

This Article challenges the common view that more stringent regulation of the digital economy inevitably compromises innovation and undermines technological progress. This view, vigorously advocated by the tech industry, has shaped the public discourse in the United States, where the country’s thriving tech economy is often associated with a staunch commitment to free markets. U.S. lawmakers have also traditionally embraced this perspective, which explains their hesitancy to regulate the tech industry to date. The European Union has chosen another path, regulating the digital economy with stringent data privacy, antitrust, content moderation, and other digital regulations designed to shape the evolution …

Viscusi Circular A-4 Peer Review Comments, W. Kip Viscusi

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

This working paper provides commentary on my 2023 peer review panel comments on the 2023 Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Circular A-4. The Prologue section introduces my official peer review comments and indicates how the structure of my comments was tailored to the guidelines established by the OMB. The main section consists of my 2023 peer review comments as they were submitted to OMB. I recommended changes in the draft Circular A-4 to increase the discount rate from the 1.7% rate that OMB proposed, to report domestic benefits whenever global benefits are reported, to adopt a behavioral transfer test …

Dci Submission To The Brazil Ministry Of Economy On The Economic And Competitive Aspects Of Digital Platforms, Pinar Akman, Stephen Dnes, Keith N. Hylton, Bowman Heiden, Constance Hiatt, Nicolas Petit, Jennifer Pullen, Annika Stohr

Faculty Scholarship

In its comments on the ‘Economic and Competitive Aspects of Digital Platforms’ for the Brazil Ministry of Economy, the Dynamic Competition Initiative (DCI) suggests that law and policy initiatives towards digital platforms should (1) focus on curbing monopoly rents in bottleneck markets, and not undermine diversification efforts towards technological frontiers; (2) leverage the capability and flexibility of existing competition rules to address digital platforms anticompetitive conduct; and (3) properly credit the consumer welfare gains stemming from digital platforms ecosystems given the domestic economic context.

Market Versus Policy Responses To Novel Occupational Risks, Robert J. Kramer, Elissa Philip Gentry, W Kip Viscusi

Scholarly Publications

The unprecedented occupational risks posed by the COVID-19 pandemic prompted employers to boost wages and federal authorities to propose hazard pay policies. This article estimates a market-based compensating differential for workers facing elevated risks through contact with the public using CPS employment data for 2019–2020 and occupational characteristic data from the US Department of Labor’s Occupational Information Network. The estimated premium for exposure was roughly $820 overall and $1000 for essential workers. These premiums fall short of those proposed—but not enacted—by the federal government and are more commensurate with estimates of the value of a statistical life than were the …

Infrastructure Finance For The Public Good: How Asset Recycling Can Untangle The New York Mta's $50 Billion Debt Load, Lev Breydo

Journal of Law and Mobility

Systematic infrastructure underinvestment – a $2.6 trillion ‘gap’ – and accelerating climate change have become facts of life in the United States. Though typically attributed to politics, this Article posits the circumstances as a market disequilibrium rooted in an interplay between unique dimensions of infrastructure and distinctive features of the U.S. approach. Legislative action, including the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, is insufficient to overcome these long-standing challenges.

Based on a broad, global study of effective approaches to infrastructure finance, as well as a multi-disciplinary analysis of the economics, engineering and finance literature, this Article proposes addressing the U.S. infrastructure …

U.S. Securities And Exchange Commission And The "Deep Administrative State": A Case Study Of Its Esg Rules, Jerry W. Markham

American University Business Law Review

This study examines the highly controversial “environmental, social, and governance” (ESG) rules that were adopted by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in 2024. Those rules require large public companies to disclose their policies for dealing with climate change and report their greenhouse gas emissions. Critics charge that those rules are the product of a “deep state” administrative agency that is operating outside the checks and balances imposed by the Constitution on other government actors. The study relates the background for these deep state concerns and the constitutional and statutory restraints that were intended to prevent the development of such …

The Future Of The International Financial System: The Emerging Cbdc Network And Its Impact On Regulation, Heng Wang, Simin Gao

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

Central bank digital currency (CBDC) is a digital form of fiat currency. CBDC has the potential to be a game challenger in the international financial system, bringing increased complexities arising from technology and regulatory considerations, as well as generating greater currency competition. As more states begin exploring CBDC, the interactions between actors may lead to the emergence of a new CBDC network. What shape would the emerging CBDC network take? What would its network effects be? What would be the impact of the CBDC network on the international financial system, or the global financial network? This article explores these questions …

Christianity And Economic Law, Daniel A. Crane

Book Chapters

From the first century forward, Christian thinkers and authorities have espoused many dierent views of economics, regulation, the role of the state, and economic law. Christian thought on economic regulation underwent systematic scholarly exposition during the Scholastic, Reformation, and modern eras, culminating in a wide array of perspectives on the role of markets and the government’s regulatory role. From Thomas Aquinas on just price theory to Martin Luther on cartelization and predatory pricing and Adam Smith on the nature of the market’s “invisible hand,” Christian and Christian-inuenced thinkers worked out the ethical and moral implications of contracts, usury, exchange, and …

Fraud In A Land Of Plenty, Jonathan R. Macey

Northwestern University Law Review

This Essay discusses the regulation of fraud in a developed economy and offers some explanations for why fraud appears to be on the increase. Ironically, regulation designed to combat fraud can actually increase fraud by attracting economic activity to fraud-ridden industries. In other words, regulation can create problems of its own by fostering the false perception that fraud is being addressed even when it is not. This analysis is relevant in the context of the current surge in sentiment to regulate cryptocurrencies in the wake of the FTX and Sam Bankman-Fried debacle. Such regulation threatens to attract more resources to …

Globalize Me: Regulating Distributed Ledger Technology, Roee Sarel, Hadar Y. Jabotinsky, Israel Klein

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT)—the technology underlying cryptocurrencies—has been identified by many as a game-changer for data storage. Although DLT can solve acute problems of trust and coor- dination whenever entities (e.g., firms, traders, or even countries) rely on a shared database, it has mostly failed to reach mass adoption out- side the context of cryptocurrencies.

A prime reason for this failure is the extreme state of regulation, which was largely absent for many years but is now pouring down via uncoordinated regulatory initiatives by different countries. Both of these extremes—under-regulation and over-regulation—are consistent with traditional concepts from law and economics. …

Digital Nudges: Contours And Challenges, Avishalom Tor

Book Chapters

Digital nudges—that is, significantly behavioral interventions that use software and its user-interface design elements—are an increasingly pervasive feature of online environments that shapes behavior both online (e.g., changing online privacy settings) and offline (e.g., taking a flu vaccine due to a text message reminder). Although digital nudges share many characteristics of their offline counterparts, they merit particular attention and analysis for two important reasons: First, the growing ubiquity of digital nudges makes encountering them nearly unavoidable in daily life, thereby bringing into sharper relief the promise and perils of nudges more generally. Second, the potentially greater potency of digital—compared to …

Nudge Efficiency, Avishalom Tor

Book Chapters

Only a small portion of the substantial literature on behavioral interventions ("nudges") that developed over the last fifteen to twenty years has considered nudges from an economic perspective. Moreover, despite the importance of the topic for a law and economics assessment of this increasingly common form of regulation, even fewer contributions have examined whether and when behavioral instruments are likely to make an efficient means for increasing social welfare. This chapter therefore offers some basic observations about nudge efficiency: Part I opens with a reminder that behavioral instruments should be implemented only when they are the most efficient means available …

How Regulations Undervalue Occupational Fatalities, W. Kip Viscusi, Robert J. Cramer

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

The U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration establishes incentives for safety by setting and enforcing regulatorystandards. Using four and a half decades of inspection data, this article provides a comprehensive analysis of the factors underpinning penalties following fatalities. The “fatality premium” for regulatory violations following a worker death is quitemodest and is several orders of magnitude below the value-of-a-statistical-life figure needed to establish efficient levels of deterrence in the absence of all other financial incentives. Although there are low statutory caps on penalties, only 8% of thepenalties for violations involving fatalities are constrained by the cap, suggesting that current statutes …

Laws And Norms With (Un)Observable Actions, Claude Fluet, Murat C. Mungan

Faculty Scholarship

We analyze the interactions between social norms, the prevalence of acts, and policies when people cannot directly observe actors’ behavior and must rely on noisy proxies. Norms provide ineffective incentives when acts are committed either very frequently or very infrequently, because noisy signals of behavior are then too weak to alter people’s beliefs about others’ behavior. This cuts against the dynamics of the ‘honor-stigma’ model (Bénabou and Tirole 2006; 2011), and leads to the opposite positive and normative conclusions with even modest errors. The review process through which public signals are provided is then an additional policy variable. When the …

Distributed Governance Of Medical Ai, W. Nicholson Price Ii

Law & Economics Working Papers

Artificial intelligence (AI) promises to bring substantial benefits to medicine. In addition to pushing the frontiers of what is humanly possible, like predicting kidney failure or sepsis before any human can notice, it can democratize expertise beyond the circle of highly specialized practitioners, like letting generalists diagnose diabetic degeneration of the retina. But AI doesn’t always work, and it doesn’t always work for everyone, and it doesn’t always work in every context. AI is likely to behave differently in well-resourced hospitals where it is developed than in poorly resourced frontline health environments where it might well make the biggest difference …

The Law And Economics Of Behavioral Regulation, Avishalom Tor

Journal Articles

This article examines the law and economics of behavioral regulation (“nudging”), which governments and organizations increasingly use to substitute for and complement traditional instruments. To advance its welfare-based assessment, Section 1 examines alternative nudging definitions and Section 2 considers competing nudges taxonomies. Section 3 describes the benefits of nudges and their regulatory appeal, while Section 4 considers their myriad costs—most notably the private costs they generate for their targets and other market participants. Section 5 then illustrates the assessment of public and private welfare nudges using cost-benefit analysis, cost-effectiveness analysis, and rationality-effects analysis.

Constitutional Review Of Federal Tax Legislation, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah, Yoseph M. Edrey

Law & Economics Working Papers

What does the Constitution mean when it says that “The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States” (US Const. Article I, Section 8, Clause 1)? The definition of “tax” for constitutional purposes has become important in light of the Supreme Court’s 2012 decision in NFIB v. Sebelius, in which Chief Justice Roberts for the Court upheld the constitutionality of the individual mandate of the Affordable Care Act under the taxing power. This has led to commentators questioning …

The Future Of The Agricultural Industry – Is Blockchain A New Beginning?, Ryan Bisel

Seattle University Law Review

As we advance into a digital era, we begin to depend on technological innovations to rapidly help develop and update processes and methods within different industries. Blockchain technology—popularized by cryptocurrency—is slowly making its debut in the agricultural supply chain. Implementing a blockchain requirement for suppliers would be beneficial because it would allow agricultural suppliers and distributors to track their products in a more efficient manner. However, there are four potential legal issues that are foreseeable: (1) preemption, (2) overlapping regulatory authority, (3) applying current legal rules to new technology, and (4) contracting. This Note will specifically focus on issues of …

Equality And Access To Credit: A Social Contract Framework, John Linarelli

Scholarly Works

The problems governments face in regulating consumer finance fall into two categories: normative and cognitive. The normative problems have to do with the way that some governments, particularly those adhering to an American model of household finance, have financed social mobility and intergenerational welfare through debt, a tenuous and socially risky policy choice. Credit has a substantial social aspect to it in the United States, where the federal government has in some way engaged in subsidizing about 1/3 of consumer credit, particularly in the residential mortgage market, feeding into a substantial capital markets dimension through government-guaranteed securitization. Most Americans think …