Category Archives: Law and Economics
Black, Rossi, Traczynski and Udalova, ‘Some Puzzles in Medical Malpractice Insurance Pricing’
ABSTRACT We use staggered difference-in-differences and panel data methods to study the factors that predict medical malpractice (‘med mal’) insurance premia, using national data on three specialties (internal medicine, general surgery, ob-gyn) from Medical Liability Monitor over 1992 to 2017. A difference-in-differences analysis of states that adopted caps during our sample period provides evidence supporting […]
Matt Zwolinski, ‘Are markets coercive?’
ABSTRACT Are markets coercive? Contemporary debate is dominated by two answers. The first, longstanding among defenders of free markets, holds that voluntary exchange is non-coercive by definition: coercion enters the picture only when rights are violated. The second, revived from Robert Hale’s 1923 essay and embraced today by progressive legal scholars and post-liberal conservatives alike, […]
Robert Weber, ‘Prying Open the Black Box of Litigation Asset Valuation’
ABSTRACT The emergence of commercial third-party litigation finance (TPLF) has revolutionized business litigation by bridging the temporal gap between present legal costs and future cash inflows from lawsuits. However, this adolescent industry faces a critical structural hurdle: the unique opacity of the ‘litigation assets’ that TPLF providers acquire when they invest in lawsuits. These idiosyncratic, […]
Haris Durrani, ‘Industrial Patent Law’
ABSTRACT History is absent from the rigorous debate on government patent policy. Scholarship has focused on the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980, where the government relinquished control over patents on inventions developed with federal funding. The act’s critics advocate the exercise of its key exception: government rights to ‘march in’ to require that contractors license patents […]
Gindis and Medema, ‘Henry Manne, Pareto in the Pines, and the Origins of the Law and Economics Movement’
ABSTRACT Law and economics – or the application of economic reasoning and methods to the study of law – was a niche topic of study at Chicago and Yale in 1950s and 1960s, before coming out of the wilderness in the early 1970s and becoming an institutionalized feature of American legal education by the late […]
Bix and Parisi, ‘Punishment and Its Relative Absence in Contract Law’
ABSTRACT The conventional view rejects punitive damages for breach of contract on the ground that expectation damages adequately protect the promisee while preserving the possibility of efficient breach. This Article reconsiders the traditional compensatory boundary of contract remedies, disentangling the compensatory and incentive functions of contract remedies and, in doing so, shows that not every […]
Enrico Baffi, ‘Mistake as a Defect of Consent: The Strengths and Weaknesses of the Italian Approach Compared with the US Approach’
ABSTRACT This essay aims to conduct a comparative inquiry into the doctrine of unilateral mistake in US and Italian contract law, adopting the methodological lens of law and economics in order both to examine the effects that the various rules produce on the conduct of contracting parties and to express an assessment, in terms of […]
Abraham Wickelgren, ‘The Effect of Consumer Inferences on Product Regulation When Information Is Costly’
ABSTRACT Consumers often value products whose purchase could also harm them, either through adverse health effects or, often with digital products, the release of sensitive data about themselves. In many cases, consumers do not know exactly how great these risk are, but they can engage in some research to learn more about it. Alternatively, the […]
Arman Valaquenta, ‘Of Equitable Liability’
ABSTRACT Limited liability is foundational to modern corporate finance because it permits diversified equity ownership, market liquidity, and impersonal capital formation. Yet finance models treat the shareholder liability cap as an exogenous legal boundary, not as a separately priced protection. This paper studies the pricing failure created by that convention. When corporate harm exceeds firm-side […]
David Cabrelli, ‘Labour Market Monopsony/Oligopsony in the UK: Putting Labour Law to Work’
ABSTRACT Neoclassical economics holds that although labour markets will be marred by monopsony/oligopsony when they are not perfectly competitive, the likelihood of such a state of affairs is vanishingly small. However, recent research is mounting a formidable challenge to this assumption: data show that labour markets in many parts of the UK landmass and economy […]