We focus in this paper on the effects of court errors on the optimal sharing of liability between firms and financiers, as an environmental policy instrument. Using a structural model of the interactions between firms, financial institutions, governments and courts we show, through numerical...

We compare decisions by female and male judges in child support trials where a judge decides on the father's income allocation to children. We investigate two types of cases: 1) when fathers have a formal job, their income is known to judges, and awards are set as a fraction of it, and 2) when...

The issue of the stability and change of legal rules occupies a central place in the discussions of alternative ways of organizing justice and the provision of legal rules. There nonetheless remains a theoretical aspect that has never been raised in the literature on judicial decision making and...

This paper proposes a structural approach to measuring the effects of electoral accountability. We estimate a political agency model with imperfect information in order to identify and quantify discipline and selection effects, using data on U.S. governors. We find that the possibility of...

In this paper we analyze sequencing situations under incomplete information where agents have interdependent costs. We first argue why Vickrey-Clarke-Groves (or VCG) mechanism fails to implement a simple sequencing problem in dominant strategies. Given this impossibility, we try to implement...

We study an adverse selection problem in which information that is imperfectly correlated with the agent's type becomes public ex post. Unbounded penalties are ruled out by assuming that the agent is wealth constrained. The following conclusions emerge. If the agent's utility is increasing in...