Punitive damage awards have been widely criticized for generating a plaintiff’s windfall (i.e., a payment in excess of the costs of pursuing the punitive claim), which promotes unnecessary litigation, the escalation of liability insurance premiums and over-deterrence. In an attempt to...

Punitive damage awards have been widely criticized for their unpredictability (2004 Economic Report of the President) and for generating a plaintiff’s windfall (i.e., a payment in excess of the costs of pursuing the punitive claim), which promotes unnecessary litigation (Dodson, 2000),...

In an attempt to reduce the liability insurance costs of firms, several US states have implemented many different kinds of tort reform. Some reforms take the form of caps or limits on punitive damage awards while others have mandated that a proportion of the award be allocated to the plaintiff...

In an attempt to reduce the liability insurance costs of firms, several US states have implemented many different kinds of tort reform. Some reforms take the form of caps or limits on punitive damage awards while others, called “split-awardsâ€, have mandated that a proportion of the...

We study a model of civil dispute with delegation in which a plaintiff's lawyer works on a contingent fee basis but a defendant's lawyer on an hourly fee basis. We first derive the conditions under which delegation to the lawyers brings both the plaintiff and defendant more payoffs, compared to...

We consider a model of bargaining by concessions where agents can terminate negotiations by accepting the settlement of an arbitrator. The impact of pragmatic arbitrators -that enforce concessions that precede their appointment - is compared with that of arbitrators that act on principle -...

This paper analyzes the impact of juvenile arrest, charge, conviction, and incarceration on an individual's propensity to graduate high school before the age of 20. The analysis is conducted using data from the NLSY97. I control for a large set of observable characteristics, including...

Este trabajo entrega contundente evidencia de que la criminalidad en Chile presenta una alta persistencia. No obstante lo anterior, existe un conjunto de variables socio económicas que explican la evolución de la mayoría de los crímenes de connotación pública en Chile durante la década de...

Abstract: We examine the effects of a government’s sensitivity to its tax revenues, earned from the software industry, on its anti-piracy policies that consists of monitoring and penalizing a commercial software pirate. We consider a strategic entry-deterrence framework where the original...

This paper examines causes of the persistence of corruption among elected politicians in democracies. We study a theoretical model of competition between two candidates who differ both in ability and popularity in a probabilistic voting setup. Each candidate proposes a tax rate and a public good...