Judges often review decisions made by government actors, such as agencies or legislatures, with greater expertise about the effects of different policy choices. One judicial response to this asymmetric information problem has been to shift the focus of review from a substantive evaluation of the...

The merits of capital levies depend on the likelihood of repetition, the extent of anticipation, and its effects on distribution. The relevance of these features, which in varying degrees is underdeveloped or underappreciated in pertinent literatures, is elaborated and then considered with...

This article examines revealed rates of time preference for public goods, using environmental quality as the case study. A nationally representative panel-based sample of 2,914 respondents considered a series of 5 conjoint policy choices, yielding 14,570 decisions. Both the conditional fixed...

A substantial literature examines second-best environmental policy, focusing particularly on how the Pigouvian directive that marginal taxes should equal marginal external harms needs to be modified in light of the preexisting distortion due to labor income taxation. Additional literature is...

This Article proposes a new method of reducing the costs administrative agencies incur in monitoring regulatory compliance by a firm that operates multiple sources of risk, such as air-polluting smokestacks. The expense of individually monitoring such sources directly may consume a large share...

Overly strict legal standards are commonly thought to discourage parties from engaging in socially desirable activities. It is explained here, however, that excessive legal standards cannot lead to undesirable curtailment of activities when legal standards are enforced by liability for...

This paper analyzes the impact of bureaucratic decision costs on agency expertise. The analysis shows that the effect of the cost associated with adopting a new regulation (the enactment cost) on agency expertise depends on what the agency would do if it remains uninformed. If an uninformed...

A substantial literature addresses the design of transfer programs and policies, including the negative income tax, other means-tested transfers, the earned income tax credit, categorical assistance, and work inducements. This work is largely independent of that on the optimal nonlinear income...

Taxation and liability are compared here as means of controlling harmful externalities. It is emphasized that liability has an advantage over taxation: inefficiency of incentives arises under taxation when, as would be typical, it would be impractical for a tax to reflect all variables that...