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...

In case of a merger or an acquisition, a tort liability that arises from the seller's conduct is often imposed on the buyer through the doctrine of successor liability. If the buyer has as much information about the potential liability as the seller, the first best is achieved: all gains from...

We analyze the impact of liability risks for malpractice on the optimal reimbursement schemes for hospitals. In our model, the hospital decides upon two unobservable efforts, a cost reduction effort and a quality improvement effort. We assume that the total effort is positive even without...

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...

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 -...

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...

To understand the consequences of the presence of international safety nets on governments' incentives to undertake reforms, we model IFIs´ interventions as country insurance policies. We find that country insurance (especially when made contingent on negative external shocks) is more likely...

Using a generalized cross-spectral approach, we propose a model-free omnibus statistical procedure to check whether the direction of changes in an economic variable is predictable using the history of its past changes. A class of separate inference procedures are also given to gauge possible...