Category Archives: Law and Economics
Buccola and Kahan, ‘Getting to yes: the role of coercion in debt renegotiations’
ABSTRACT This article develops a comprehensive account of the methods of consent solicitation broadly construed. We offer four principal contributions. First, we identify the features of a solicitation that can produce coercive intercreditor dynamics. Second, we document the possibility of coercive methods under standard bond and loan contracts. Third, we show that economic considerations can […]
Ignacio Adrian Lerer, ‘Why Bad Law Persists: Evolutionary Stable Strategies in Legal Systems’
ABSTRACT This paper applies the concept of Evolutionary Stable Strategies (ESS), developed by Maynard Smith and Price (1973) and popularized by Dawkins (1976), to explain the persistence of inefficient, suboptimal, or seemingly irrational legal arrangements. Unlike previous evolutionary theories of law that failed by treating legal rules as organisms subject to natural selection, we demonstrate […]
Piano and Piano, ‘The Medieval Origins of Spousal Consent’
ABSTRACT This paper examines the medieval origins of spousal consent, the norm requiring that marriages be contracted willingly and . Afree from pressure from third parties. We argue that this norm resulted from the Catholic Church’s consolidation of legal authority over marriage in the 11th-12th centuries. Committed doctrinally to the belief that marriages could not […]
Jonathan Hardman, ‘Corporate Law as Public Policy’
ABSTRACT Corporate law is a public policy balance. The state creates the corporation, and provides its legal features. ‘Micro’ aspects of the corporation, like separate legal personality, limited liability, and perpetual succession, were each provided by the state for public benefits rather than for their evident private benefits. Widespread utilisation of the corporation provides ‘macro’ […]
Tadeusz Dudycz, ‘Legal form affects the performance of a company’
ABSTRACT Using the latent multidimensional approach, the paper examines the relationship between a company’s legal form and its performance. Based on 72,596 observations of companies operating in Poland, we show that the legal form has a strong relationship with the company’s efficiency. We reveal that the corporate form and limited liability, contrary to popular opinion, […]
Jabotinsky and Sarel, ‘The Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive: A Law & Economics Evaluation’
ABSTRACT The Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CS3D), adopted by the European Union in June 2024, represents an ambitious regulatory experiment that transforms large corporations into gatekeepers of sustainable supply chains. This paper provides a comprehensive Law & Economics analysis of the CS3D, revealing several overlooked incentive problems that may undermine its effectiveness. We identify […]
Bechtold, Dari-Mattiacci, Martino and Parchomovsky, ‘Property Without Law. Personalized Property Rights Through Smart Contracts on the Blockchain’
ABSTRACT Emerging technologies for the automatic enforcement of contracts, conventionally referred to as smart contracts, have the potential to realize Professor Alan Schwartz’ ideal of an efficient contract law for sophisticated parties, as they reduce the cost of textualist enforcement, added contingencies, and privately-provided templates, and offer a way to get around mandatory rules relating […]
Szymon Osmola, ‘Improving the Quality of Consumer Choice: Unfair Terms Directive Revisited’
ABSTRACT This article investigates how the Unfair Terms Directive (UTD) attempts to improve the quality of consumer choice through establishing the extended choice mechanism. The article consists of three parts: analytical, interpretive, and doctrinal. The analytical part explains how the ex post control of contract terms provides consumers with an opportunity to rethink their original, […]
Peter-Jan Engelen, ‘Did BP Pay a Reputational Penalty for the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill?’
ABSTRACT In 2010 the British multinational oil and gas company BP was involved in an oil spill incident in the Gulf of Mexico following a fire on the Deepwater Horizon drilling platform BP lost no less than one third of its market value between the time of the start and the closing of the leak. […]
Choi and Spier, ‘Remedies for Non-Disclosure in Asset Sales: Voidance vs Damages’
ABSTRACT This paper analyzes the problems of non-disclosure in the context of an asset sale between a buyer and a seller. The seller can have important information about the asset and can opportunistically decide not to disclose that information to the buyer, and the buyer may sue the seller ex post for remedy. The buyer […]