Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons™
Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
Articles 1 - 9 of 9
Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
Whatever Did Happen To The Antitrust Movement?, Herbert J. Hovenkamp
Whatever Did Happen To The Antitrust Movement?, Herbert J. Hovenkamp
All Faculty Scholarship
Antitrust in the United States today is caught between its pursuit of technical rules designed to define and implement defensible economic goals, and increasing calls for a new antitrust “movement.” The goals of this movement have been variously defined as combating industrial concentration, limiting the economic or political power of large firms, correcting the maldistribution of wealth, control of high profits, increasing wages, or protection of small business. High output and low consumer prices are typically unmentioned.
In the 1960s the great policy historian Richard Hofstadter lamented the passing of the antitrust “movement” as one of the “faded passions of …
Defending A Mixed Economy, Herbert J. Hovenkamp
Defending A Mixed Economy, Herbert J. Hovenkamp
All Faculty Scholarship
This essay reviews Jacob S. Hacker's and Paul Pierson's very engaging book, American Amnesia: How the War on Government Led Us to Forget what Made America Prosper (2016).
The Progressives: Economics, Science, And Race, Herbert J. Hovenkamp
The Progressives: Economics, Science, And Race, Herbert J. Hovenkamp
All Faculty Scholarship
This essay is a brief review of Thomas C. Leonard, Illiberal Reformers: Race, Eugenics, and American Economics in the Progressive Era (Princeton Univ. Press 2016).
The Marginalist Revolution In Corporate Finance: 1880-1965, Herbert J. Hovenkamp
The Marginalist Revolution In Corporate Finance: 1880-1965, Herbert J. Hovenkamp
All Faculty Scholarship
During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries fundamental changes in economic thought revolutionized the theory of corporate finance, leading to changes in its legal regulation. The changes were massive, and this branch of financial analysis and law became virtually unrecognizable to those who had practiced it earlier. The source of this revision was the marginalist, or neoclassical, revolution in economic thought. The classical theory had seen corporate finance as an historical, relatively self-executing inquiry based on the classical theory of value and administered by common law courts. By contrast, neoclassical value theory was forward looking and as a result …
Tracking Berle's Footsteps: The Trail Of The Modern Corporation's Law Chapter, William W. Bratton, Michael L. Wachter
Tracking Berle's Footsteps: The Trail Of The Modern Corporation's Law Chapter, William W. Bratton, Michael L. Wachter
All Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.
Neoclassicism And The Separation Of Ownership And Control, Herbert J. Hovenkamp
Neoclassicism And The Separation Of Ownership And Control, Herbert J. Hovenkamp
All Faculty Scholarship
"Separation of ownership and control" is a phrase whose history will forever be associated with Adolf A. Berle and Gardiner C. Means' The Modern Corporation and Private Property (1932), as well as with Institutionalist economics, Legal Realism, and the New Deal. Within that milieu the large publicly held business corporation became identified with excessive managerial power at the expense of stockholders, social irresponsibility, and internal inefficiency. Neoclassical economists both then and ever since have generally been critical, both of the historical facts that Berle and Means purported to describe and of the conclusions that they drew. In fact, however, within …
Pari Passu And A Distressed Sovereign's Rational Choices, William W. Bratton
Pari Passu And A Distressed Sovereign's Rational Choices, William W. Bratton
All Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.
Knowledge About Welfare: Legal Realism And The Separation Of Law And Economics, Herbert J. Hovenkamp
Knowledge About Welfare: Legal Realism And The Separation Of Law And Economics, Herbert J. Hovenkamp
All Faculty Scholarship
The welfare state could not function without judgments about how well off its citizens are. For example, governments devise progressive income taxes, which are designed to capture more wealth from the well off and less from the impecunious. These policies presume an ability to take a manageable amount of information about an individual's income or assets and make judgments about her welfare. In fact, people do this all the time, mostly without thinking about the methodological problems involved.
The superficial casualness of our daily observations about welfare belies the state of the economic science of welfare measurement. Economists have attempted …
The First Great Law & Economics Movement, Herbert J. Hovenkamp
The First Great Law & Economics Movement, Herbert J. Hovenkamp
All Faculty Scholarship
Beginning in the 1880s American economists turned their attention to the law in a way unprecedented in American thought. Some legal academics in turn incorporated economics into their thinking about the law. Whether their output or its impact were great enough to warrant calling their efforts a law and economics "movement" is worth debating. This essay argues that there was such a movement.
Four things account for the increasing interest in law and economics at the turn of the century: (1) the widespread application of evolutionary models to the development of both law and economic theory; (2) the influence of …