The legal foundation of the monetary system is the law of legal tender. The 'legal tender' concept is used in models to describe almost anything except for what it really means in actual laws. Such errors prevent an accurate evaluation of the importance of this legal status. This note explains...

If a seller delivers a good non-conforming to the contract, Article 2 of the UCC as well as European warranty law allows consumers to choose between some money transfer and termination. Termination rights are, however, widely criticized, mainly for fear that the buyer resorts to "opportunistic...

This study models producer protection legislation that would grant growers the right to claim damages (PPLD) if their contracts are prematurely terminated. In the absence of contracting frictions that prevent contractors from redesigning contracts to accommodate exogenous policy changes, PPLD...

We relate the design of contract law to the process of development. In this paper, contract law de fines which private agreements are enforceable (i.e. are binding and enforced by courts) and which are not. Speci cally, we consider an economy where agents face a hold-up problem (moral hazard in...

If a seller delivers a good non-conforming to contract, European and US warranty law allows consumers to choose between some money transfer and termination. Termination rights are, however, widely criticized, mainly for fear that the buyer may use non-conformity as a pretext for getting rid of a...

We consider default rules for instances in which parties to a contract did not allocate the risk of a certain contingency, and both sides could have helped avoid the occurrence of breach of the contract or lessen the damages from it occurring. We compare alternative regimes with a fault-based...

The coherence principle was elaborated by the legal scholar Dimitri Houtcieff in the field of contract law of the French legal system as an instrument for overcoming those contradictions regarding the contract or the contractual behavior which may be damaging for the other party or even for...

Should the EU introduce an Optional European Contract Law Code and what should it look like? By applying economic theories of federalism and regulatory competition (legal federalism), it is shown why an Optional Code would be a very suitable legal instrument within a two-level European System of...

Contract law and the economics of contract have, for the most part, developed independently of each other. In this essay, we briefly review the notion of a contract from the perspective of lawyer, and then use this framework to organize the economics literature on contract. The title, Contracts...

Naidu and Yuchtman (2013) find that labor demand shocks in 19th-century Britain had an impact on master and servant prosecutions, as breaking an employee contract was a criminal offense until 1875. We first reproduce all regression tables in Naidu and Yuchtman (2013) and then test for robustness...