Americans drive 2,360,000,000,000 miles each year, far outstripping other nations. Every time a driver takes to the road, and with each mile she drives, she exposes herself and others to the risk of accident. Insurance premiums are only weakly linked to mileage, however and have largely lump-sum...

[Forthcoming in Brookings Papers on Economic Activity] We analyse the major economic issues raised by the 1997 Tobacco Resolution and the ensuing proposed legislation that were intended to settle tobacco litigation in the United States. By settling litigation largely in return for tax increases,...

The goal of our empirical analysis is to assess whether the changes in cigarette excise taxes and cigarette prices can be attributed to litigation brought by the states and the resulting settlements, holding other factors constant. Using pre-post as well as state excise taxes on beer as...

ENGLISH ABSTRACT: On 1 January 1995, the Understanding on Rules and Procedures Governing the Settlement of Disputes (DSU) entered into force. During its first ten years, the DSU has since been applied to 324 complaints – more cases than dispute settlement under the GATT 1947 had dealt with in...

By reinterpreting Savage axioms as axioms of the social rationality over resource allocations, we derive a social welfare function encompassing individual social values and a social attitude towards distributional inequality. Wealth maximization becomes the purpose of law only if individuals...

The recent surge in U.S. patenting and expansion of patentable subject matter has increased patent office backlogs and raised concerns that in some cases patents of insufficient quality or with inadequate search of prior art are being issued. At the same time patent litigation and its costs are...

We report the results of the first comparative study of the determinants and effects of patent oppositions in Europe and of re- examinations on corresponding patents issued in the United States. The analysis is based on a dataset consisting of matched EPO and US patents. Our analysis focuses on...

This paper examines the empirical relationship between the quality of the Indian judiciary and the economic development of the Indian States and Union Territories. It evaluates this causality by analysing the development of the state-level per capita income and poverty rates. I define the...

The tax office wins most cases in Japan. We think about why this might be. We find that although judges who rule in favor of the taxpayer do not suffer in their future careers, if the loser-- whether governemnt or taxpayer--appeals and wins, the reversed judge's career does take a turn for the...

The paper investigates whether and how performance of regional commercial courts has affected external credit of Russian enterprises between 1995 and 2002. The results show that more reliable courts lead to higher bank lending to firms. This occurs predominantly through expansion of the number...