Law and Economics Commons^™

Can Timor-Leste Rely On Its Endowments To Achieve The Strategic Development Plan Targets?, Nicolas Maennling

Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment Staff Publications

The Government of Timor-Leste invited the Earth Institute and CCSI to advise on the sustainable management and use of oil resources, in order to achieve higher living standards and sustainable development. One component of the project included the preparation of a sector study that assesses whether the Government can rely on agriculture, tourism and the petrochemical sectors to achieve its long term GDP growth and employment targets.

Racial Disparity In The Criminal Justice Process: Prosecutors, Judges, And The Effects Of United States V. Booker, Sonja Starr, M. Marit Rehavi

Law & Economics Working Papers

Current empirical estimates of racial and other unwarranted disparities in sentencing suffer from two pervasive flaws. The first is a focus on the sentencing stage in isolation. Studies control for the “presumptive sentence” or closely related measures that are themselves the product of discretionary charging, plea-­‐bargaining, and fact-­‐finding processes. Any disparities in these earlier processes are built into the control variable, which leads to misleading sentencing-­‐disparity estimates. The second problem is specific to studies of sentencing reforms: they use loose methods of causal inference that do not disentangle the effects of reform from surrounding events and trends.

This Article explains …

A Distinction Without A Difference? An Examination Of The Legal And Ethical Difference Between Asset Protection And Fraudulent Transfers Under Virginia Law, Landon C. Davis Iii, Isaac A. Mcbeth, Elizabeth Southall

University of Richmond Law Review

No abstract provided.

Information Escrows, Ian Ayres, Cait Unkovic

Michigan Law Review

A variety of information escrows - including allegation escrows, suspicion escrows, and shared-interest escrows - hold the promise of reducing the first-mover disadvantage that can deter people with socially valuable private information from disclosing that information to others. Information escrows allow people to transmit sensitive information to a trusted intermediary, an escrow agent, who only forwards the information under prespecified conditions. For example, an allegation escrow for sexual harassment might allow a victim to place a private complaint into escrow with instructions that the complaint be lodged with the proper authorities only if the escrow agent receives at least one …

Markets As A Moral Foundation For Contract Law, Nathan B. Oman

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Selling Structured Settlements: The Uncertain Effect Of Anti-Assignment Clauses , Gregory Scott Crespi

Pepperdine Law Review

No abstract provided.

Real-Time Collection Of The Value-Added Tax: Some Business And Legal Implications, Richard Thompson Ainsworth, Boryana Madzharova

Faculty Scholarship

Recent estimates of the level of VAT fraud in the EU are commensurate with the EU budget. With the Green paper on the future of VAT, the European Commission stressed the urgency and necessity of comprehensive VAT reforms. This paper analyses the business and legal implications of the recently proposed split-payment mechanism, which, if implemented, would move VAT’s method of collection to real-time. The discussion is positioned in the context of two increasingly visible trends in the EU – the general shift towards greater reliance on indirect taxation and the growing popularity of electronic payment instruments. The potential implementation of …

Facebook, The Jobs Act, And Abolishing Ipos, Adam C. Pritchard

Law & Economics Working Papers

The market for initial public offerings (IPOs) — the first sale of private firms’ stock to the public — is notorious for its swings from peaks to valleys. This paper argues that these swings reflect serious flaws in the IPO scheme, and that U.S. capital markets should move toward a more stable alternative. Specifically, this paper argues for a two-tier market system in which new stock issuers initially participate in a less-regulated private capital market of accredited investors and then, if they choose, they can move to a more regulated, broader public market. Likewise, firms currently participating in the public …

Creating Hammer V. Dagenhart, Logan E. Sawyer Iii

Scholarly Works

Hammer v. Dagenhart is among the best known cases in the canon of constitutional law. It struck down the first federal child labor law on the grounds that Congress’s commerce power allowed it to prohibit the interstate shipment of harmful goods, like impure food and drugs, but not harmless goods, like the products of child labor. Withering criticism of the decision spread from Justice Holmes’s famous dissent to law reviews, treatises, casebooks, and constitutional law classes. For nearly a century the decision has been scorned as inconsistent with precedent, incoherent as policy, and driven solely by the Court’s reactionary commitment …

A Financial Economic Theory Of Punitive Damages, Robert J. Rhee

UF Law Faculty Publications

This Article provides a financial economic theory of punitive damages. The core problem, as the Supreme Court acknowledged in Exxon Shipping Co. v. Baker, is not the systemic amount of punitive damages in the tort system; rather, it is the risk of outlier outcomes. Low frequency, high severity awards are unpredictable, cause financial distress, and beget social cost. By focusing only on offsetting escaped liability, the standard law and economics theory fails to account for the core problem of variance. This Article provides a risk arbitrage analysis of the relationship between variance, litigation valuation, and optimal deterrence. Starting with settlement …

Why Copyright Falls Behind The Requirement For Protecting Graphic User Interfaces: Case Studies On Limitations Of Copyright Protection For Guis In China, Ling Jin, Yihong Ying

IP Theory

No abstract provided.

The Private Costs Of Patent Litigation, James Bessen, Michael J. Meurer

Faculty Scholarship

This paper estimates the total cost of patent litigation to alleged infringers. We use a large sample of stock market event studies around the date of lawsuit filings for US public firms from 1984-99. We find that the total costs of litigation are much greater than legal fees and costs are large even for lawsuits that settle. Lawsuits cost alleged infringers about $28.7 million ($92) in the mean and $2.9 million in the median. Moreover, infringement risk rose sharply during the late 1990s to over 14% of R&D spending. Small firms have lower risk relative to R&D.

Beyond Economics In Pay For Performance, Tamara C. Belinfanti

Articles & Chapters

This article argues that while much of the intellectual energy has focused on the economics of executive pay, the challenge of executive compensation is as much a challenge of human behavior as it is one of economics. The raison d’etre of pay for performance (PFP) is to motivate executives to make decisions that are in the best interest of their firm and its shareholders. Attention to the relevant individual, situational, cultural, and institutional dynamics (what I term “behavioral dynamics”) that affect how executives are motivated and how they value future rewards is critical for the sustainability of PFP as a …

Law And Economics As A Pillar Of Legal Education, W. Kip Viscusi, Joni Hersch

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

This paper reports the distribution of doctoral degrees in economics and in other fields among faculy at the 26 hghest-ranked law schools. Almost one-third of professors at the top 13 law schools have a Ph.D. degree, with 9 % having a Ph.D. in economics. Law school rank is hghly correlated with the share of faculy holding a Ph.D. in economics and is less correlated with the share offaculy with other doctoral degrees. Law and economics is a major area of legal scholarsh based on citations in the law literature and other impact rankings. In recognition of the increased importance of …

How To Choose The Least Unconstitutional Option: Lessons For The President (And Others) From The Debt Ceiling Standoff, Neil H. Buchanan, Michael C. Dorf

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

The federal statute known as the “debt ceiling” limits total borrowing by the United States. Congress has repeatedly raised the ceiling to authorize necessary borrowing, but a political standoff in 2011 nearly made it impossible to borrow funds to meet obligations that Congress had affirmed earlier that very year. Some commentators urged President Obama to ignore the debt ceiling, while others responded that such borrowing would violate the separation of powers and therefore that the president should refuse to spend appropriated funds.

This Article analyzes the choice the president nearly faced in summer 2011, and which he or a successor …

A Financial Economic Theory Of Punitive Damages, Robert J. Rhee

Michigan Law Review

This Article provides a financial economic theory of punitive damages. The core problem, as the Supreme Court acknowledged in Exxon Shipping Co. v. Baker, is not the systemic amount of punitive damages in the tort system; rather it is the risk of outlier outcomes. Low frequency, high severity awards are unpredictable, cause financial distress, and beget social cost. By focusing only on offsetting escaped liability, the standard law and economics theory fails to account for the core problem of variance. This Article provides a risk arbitrage analysis of the relationship between variance, litigation valuation, and optimal deterrence. Starting with settlement …

Grave Consequences For Economic Liberty: The Funeral Industry's Protectionist Occupational Licensing Scheme, The Circuit Split, And Why It Matters, Lana Harfoush

The Journal of Business, Entrepreneurship & the Law

This article examines a current circuit split regarding the constitutionality of restrictive occupational licensing schemes that exist only for protectionist purposes. The Sixth Circuit in Craigmiles v. Giles and the Tenth Circuit case Powers v. Harris, are cases that revolve around similar facts but reach opposite outcomes. The two cases profile state funeral industry licensing restrictions. In both cases, the plaintiffs were penalized for selling caskets without state-issued licenses. Though licensing restrictions in the funeral industry affect most Americans as consumers, the scope of this circuit split reaches into nearly every industry. When businesses lobby governments to enact legislation, they …

The Inherent Instability Of The Financial System, Kim De Glossop

The Journal of Business, Entrepreneurship & the Law

The article explores one of the causes of the financial crisis of 2008 and of financial crises generally. The argument of the paper is that rather than tend toward equilibrium, financial and asset markets have a tendency to become unstable after prolonged periods of stability. The main driver of this process is the expansion of credit. Debt feeds its way into higher asset prices which in turn justify the accumulation of more debt to purchase further assets, and so on. The basis for the idea is Hyman Minsky's Financial Instability Hypothesis, itself a reinterpretation of The General Theory of Employment, …

"Perpetual Trusts: The Walking Dead" And "Congress Should Effectively Curb Gst Exemption For Perpetual Trusts.", Calvin H. Johnson, Lawrence W. Waggoner

Law & Economics Working Papers

In separate but complementary letters to the editor of Tax Notes, Calvin Johnson (University of Texas School of Law) and Lawrence Waggoner (University of Michigan Law School) respond to an article by Dennis Belcher and seven other practicing attorneys that defend the GST exemption for perpetual trusts. In Federal Tax Rules Should Not Be Used to Limit Trust Duration, 126 Tax Notes 832 (Aug 13, 2012), the attorneys argue that the duration of a trust is a state law issue. Their article is actually a response to a Shelf Project article: Lawrence W. Waggoner, Effectively Curbing the GST Exemption for …

Training Lawyer-Entrepreneurs, Luz E. Herrera

Faculty Scholarship

The Great Recession has caused many new attorneys to question their decisions to go to law school. The highly publicized decline in employment opportunities for lawyers has called into question the value of obtaining a law degree. The tightening of the economy has diminished the availability of entry-level jobs for law graduates across employment sectors. Large law firms are laying-off lawyers, bringing in smaller first year associate classes, hiring more contract and experienced lateral attorneys. Government entities and public interest organizations have suffered furloughs, and hiring freezes, and are relying more on volunteers than on new employees to get the …