For nearly three centuries, Indigenous peoples within the borders of present-day Canada engaged in treaty-making with the British Crown and other European powers. These treaties regularly formed the colonial legal basis for access to Indigenous lands. However, treaties were not negotiated...

Both types of legal intervention in contracts and their modifications -- voiding without regard to price and control of price -- are used by courts to counter problems of pronounced holdup. Also, various price control regulations appear to serve the same objective, at least in part, for instance...

We consider a principal-agent model in which the agent needs to raise capital from the principal to finance a project. Our model is based on DeMarzo and Fishman (2003), except that the agent's cash flows are given by a Brownian motion with drift in continuous time. The difficulty in writing an...

Mexico, a prominent liberalizer, failed to attain stellar gross domestic product (GDP) growth in the 1990s, and since 2001 its GDP and exports have stagnated. In this paper we argue that the lack of spectacular growth in Mexico cannot be blamed on either the North American Free Trade Agreement...

This paper analyzes dynamic equilibrium risk sharing contracts between profit-maximizing intermediaries and a large pool of ex-ante identical agents that face idiosyncratic income uncertainty that makes them heterogeneous ex-post. In any given period, after having observed her income, the agent...

We study a general equilibrium model in which entrepreneurs finance investment with optimal financial contracts. Because of enforceability problems, contracts are constrained efficient. We show that limited enforceability amplifies the impact of technological innovations on aggregate output....

We analyze venture capital (VC) investments in twenty-three non-U.S. countries and compare them to VC investments in the U.S. We describe how the contracts allocate cash flow, board, liquidation, and other control rights. In univariate analyses, contracts differ across legal regimes. At the same...

The major theme of this article is that the interpretation of contracts -- their possible amplification, correction, and modification by adjudicators -- is in the interests of contracting parties. The general reasons are (a) that interpretation may improve on otherwise imperfect contracts; and...

Multi-period theoretical models of renewable insurance display front-loaded premium schedules that both cover lifetime total claims of low-risk and high-risk individuals and provide an incentive for those who remain low-risk to continue to purchase the policy. In practice, however, an age...

Contract law governs agreements between parties. This paper contains the chapters on contract law from a general, forthcoming book, Foundations of Economic Analysis of Law (Harvard University Press, 2003). Chapter 13 presents an overview of the subject. Chapter 14 is concerned with contract...