Research on capital structure attempts to explain how corporations finance real investment, with particular emphasis on the proportions of debt vs. equity financing. There is no universal theory of the debt-equity choice, and no reason to expect one. But three useful conditional theories are...

This paper reports the results of an experiment designed to assess the ability of an incumbent seller to profitably foreclose a market with exclusive contracts. We use the strategic environment described by Rasmusen, Ramseyer, and Wiley (1991) and Segal and Whinston (2000) where entry is...

The economic analysis of delay in legal procedures has received considerable attention in the past. Some of these works focus on the determinants of delay in litigation but very little analysis has been dedicated to examining if tactical delay may actually help the settlement process. The paper...

Efficiency defence and merger remedies are key components in most merger control regimes. Although in many jurisdictions both the provision of efficiency-related evidence and remedy offers are at the merging firms' discretion, most previous works have only analysed them separately. This paper is...

A textualist interpretation of the implied private right of action under Section 10(b) of the Exchange Act concludes that the right to recover money damages in an aftermarket fraud can be no broader than the express right of recovery under Section 18(a) of the Exchange Act. The Act's original...

We collect a new dataset on capital punishment in the US and we propose a test of racial bias based upon patterns of sentence reversals. We model the courts as minimizing type I and II errors. If trial courts were unbiased, conditional on defendants race the error rate should be independent of...

The burden of proof is a central feature of adjudication, and analogues exist in many other settings. It constitutes an important but largely unappreciated policy instrument that interacts with the level of enforcement effort and magnitude of sanctions in controlling harmful activity. Models are...

In this paper, we conduct an empirical analysis of the impact of better judicial enforcement on the probability of being credit rationed, loan size, and the probability of bankruptcy using household-level data from the Japanese Panel Survey of Consumers, conducted by the Institute for Research...

An arbiter can decide a case on the basis of his priors, or the two parties to the conflict may present further evidence. The parties may misrepresent evidence in their favor at a cost. At equilibrium the two parties never testify together. When the evidence is much in favor of one party, this...

Agents may commit a crime twice. The act is inefficient so that the agents are to be deterred. Even if an agent is law abiding, they may still commit the act accidentally. The agents are wealth constrained. The government seeks to minimize the probability of apprehension. If the benefit from the...