Showing 1 - 10 of 147
This article develops two points. First, insurance against the risk of legal change is largely unavailable, primarily because of the correlated nature of the losses that legal change generates. Second, given the absence of insurance against legal change, it is generally desirable for legal...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10010950735
This paper explores the origins and impact of "truth-in-advertising" regulation during the Progressive era. Was advertising regulation adopted in response to rent-seeking on the part of firms who sought to limit the availability of advertising as a competitive device? Or was advertising...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005084853
As measured by the pace of city growth in western Europe from 1000 to 1800. absolutist monarchs stunted the growth of commerce and industry. A region ruled by an absolutist prince saw its total urban population shrink by one hundred thousand people per century relative to a region without...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005714094
A basic question for the design of bankruptcy law concerns whether value should be divided in accordance with absolute priority. Research done in the past decade has suggested that deviations from absolute priority have beneficial ex ante effects. In contrast, this paper shows that ex post...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005829296
In the absence of owners, how effective are the constraints imposed by the state in promoting effective firm governance? This paper develops state-level indices of the legal and reporting rules facing not-for-profits and examines the effects of these rules on not-for-profit behavior. Stronger...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005829317
The world's population is living longer but retiring earlier, and vast numbers of adults now spend as much as 1/3 of their lifetimes relying on public and private retirement benefits. Consequently, labor economists are interested in the forces driving retirement behavior, seeking to understand...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005778038
Financially constrained borrowers have the incentive to influence the appraisal process in order to increase borrowing or reduce the interest rate. We document that the average valuation bias for residential refinance transactions is above 5%. The bias is larger for highly leveraged...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10010703331
Regulation and the negligence rule are both designed to obtain compliance with desired standards of behavior, but they differ in a primary respect: compliance with regulation is ordinarily assessed independently of the occurrence of harm, whereas compliance with the negligence rule is evaluated...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10010821835
Economic teams, including the business partnership, are created to exploit gains from cooperation, but teams also fall prey to shirking and other opportunistic behaviors, which lead to their dissolution. If team production is partly financed with debt, the untimely dissolution of partnerships...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10008788776
This paper describes our construction of the Global Financial Development Database and uses the data to compare financial systems around the world. The database provides information on financial systems in 205 economies over the period from 1960 to 2010 and includes measures of (1) size of...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10010969344