The economic approach to law relies on the use of economic models, mostly mathematical, for understanding the nature and function of law. The articles in this collection reflect state-of-the-art modeling techniques and explore how to use these to both formulate important questions and resolve...

Debtors’ prisons have been commonplace throughout history, including in the United States. While imprisonment for debt no doubt elicited some repayment by benefactors of the debtor, we argue that its primary function was to deter default in the first place by giving borrowers an incentive to...

Redemption laws give mortgagors the right to redeem their property following default for a statutorily set period of time. This article develops a theory that explains these laws as a means of protecting landowners against the loss of nontransferable values associated with their land. A longer...

Redemption laws give mortgagors the right to redeem their property following default for a statutorily set period of time. This paper develops a theory that explains these laws as a means of protecting landowners against the loss of non-transferable values associated with their land. A longer...

We consider why the gender division of labor is so often enforced by custom and why customary gender divisions of labor generally involve both direction and prohibition. In our formal model, agents first learn skills and then enter the marriage market. We show that wasteful behavior may emerge...

I apply features of the economics of conflict and spatial competition in developing a model of the emergence of land ownership in hunter-gatherer societies. Tenure regimes are the result of interactions between those seeking to defend claims to land and those seeking to infringe on those claims....

I describe algorithms for drawing from distributions using adaptive Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods, introduce a Mata function for performing adaptive MCMC, amcmc(), and a suite of functions amcmc *() allowing an alternative implementation of adaptive MCMC. amcmc() and amcmc *() may be...

I describe algorithms for drawing from distributions using adaptive Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods, introduce a Mata function for per- forming adaptive MCMC, amcmc(), and a suite of functions amcmc_*() allowing an implementation of adaptive MCMC using a structure. To ease use in...