As our societies face new challenges and make new demands from policies addressing international investment, there is a new urgency to profoundly reconsider treaties addressing investment. This paper was prepared originally as background for initial inter-governmental and public discussions at...

Market forces, supplemented by government policy, affect how firms and households jointly determine product and workplace safety levels. After developing the economic theory of how labor and product markets pair prices and health risks we then explain the effects of the relevant government...

Comparing the safety of prescription drugs over time is difficult due to the paucity of reliable quantitative measures of drug safety. Both the academic literature and popular press have focused on drug withdrawals as a proxy for breakdowns in the drug safety system. This metric, however, is...

We propose an activity-generating theory of regulation. When courts make errors, tort litigation becomes unpredictable and as such imposes risk on firms, thereby discouraging entry, innovation, and other socially desirable activity. When social returns to innovation are higher than private...

In recent decades, the involvement of economists as consultants and expert witnesses in civil tort actions has grown rapidly. In this article, the authors discuss the reasons for this phenomenon and the extent to conflicts of interest to arise in the practice of what is frequently called...

Judgment proof injurers can be expected to take less than optimal precaution, as they bear only a part of the accident loss. However, it has been showed that under certain conditions the judgment proof problem can lead to overprecaution. We argue that overprecaution can never occur in magnitude...

Many communities are concerned about the reuse of potentially contaminated land ("brownfields") and believe that environmental liability is a hindrance to redevelopment. However, with land price adjustments, liability might not impede the reuse of this land. Existing literature has found price...

The economic analysis of tort law is extended to multi-party accidents with unobservable actions. Due to the requirement of no punitive damages, the problem resembles a team production problem. It is shown that asymmetry in the agents' impact on the stochastic damage function can be exploited to...

Although the corrective tax has long been viewed by economists as a theoretically desirable remedy for the problem of harmful externalities, its actual use has been limited, mainly to the domain of pollution. Liability, in contrast, has great importance in controlling harmful externalities. I...