Firms will exert too little preventive care if damages are likely to exceed their equity. This is particularly important for environmental and product liability and motivates the current discussion about extending liability to creditors. We propose a model where the firm can be financed by...

This paper studies the consequences of asymmetric litigation costs. Under three differ- ent protocols: static legal process, dynamic legal process with exogenous sequencing and dynamic legal process with endogenous sequencing, solutions are obtained for the litigation efforts and the expected...

We explore the incentives countries face in trade litigation within the new WTO Dispute Settlement System. Our analysis yields a number of interesting predictions. First, because sanctions are ruled out during the litigation process, the Dispute Settlement System does not preclude all new trade...

Companies are sometimes accused of misleading the market. The SEC can punish this with enforcement actions. Alternatively, shareholders can seek redress through a shareholder class action (SCA). While some literature has examined SEC actions, it has not examined SCAs, and has not examined...

We study the optimal design of liability schemes (at the corporate or individual level) when the objective is to deter socially harmful corporate behavior without discouraging productivity enhancements. We assume that firms face agency problems between shareholders and managers (moral hazard)...

A large literature showed that small firms experience difficulties in accessing the credit market due to informational asymmetries; these may be mitigated by collateral or relationship lending, possibilities often precluded to small business. We investigate the effect on small business finance...

Collateral is one of the most important features of a debt contract. A substantial theoretical literature motivates the use of collateral as a means to alleviate ex-ante and ex-post information asymmetries between borrowers and lenders and the incidence of credit rationing. Through its seniority...

Networks can have an important effect on economic outcomes. Given the complexity of many of these networks, agents will generally not know their structure. We study the sensitivity of game-theoretic predictions to the specification of players’ (common) prior on the network in a setting where...