The paper investigates the effect of local economic conditions on crime. The study focuses on Italy’s local labor markets and analyzes the short-term response of crime to the severe slump of 2007-2009. It shows that the downturn led to a significant increase in economic-related offenses that...

The composer has historically been at the top of the tree in the music industry; most royalties due to artists flow back to composers/songwriters rather than performers. Over the last few decades, the enactment of stronger performers’ rights has sought to redress this historical imbalance by...

We study a contracting model with unforeseen contingencies in which the court is an active player. Ex-ante, the contracting parties cannot include the risky unforeseen contingencies in the contract they draw up. Ex-post the court observes whether an unforeseen contingency occurred, and decides...

This is the first of the country-specific European Social Survey topline results reports. Focusing on UK data from the Round 5 module entitled ‘trust in justice,' we link people’s perceptions of police legitimacy to their compliance with the law and their willingness to cooperate with the...

We embed a simple contracting model with ex-ante investments in which there is scope for Court intervention in a full-blown open-ended dynamic setting. The underlying preferences of both Courts and contracting parties are fully forward looking and unbiased. Our point of departure is instead the...

We find an economic rationale for the common sense answer to the question in our title — courts should not always enforce what the contracting parties write. We describe and analyze a contractual environment that allows a role for an active court. An active court can improve on the outcome...

We describe and analyze a contractual environment that allows a role for an active court. The model we analyze is the same as in Anderlini, Felli, and Postlewaite (2006). An active court can improve on the outcome that the parties would achieve without it. The institutional role of the court is...

The dominant explanatory/justificatory framework informing scholarly commentary on copyright law, policy and theory today – certainly in the US – is law and economics. From this perspective, copyright law exists to underpin markets in certain categories of ‘information good’ (copyright...

In this article we provide a rationale for bankruptcy law that is based on the conflicts among creditors that occur when a debtor's iabilities exceed its assets. In the absence of a bankruptcy law, the private debt-collection remedies that creditors pursue when a debtor is insolvent result in an...

This paper examines the relationship between immigration and crime in a setting where large migration flows offer an opportunity to carefully appraise whether the populist view that immigrants cause crime is borne out by rigorous evidence. We consider possible crime effects from two large waves...