We analyze the design of legal principles and procedures for court decision-making in civil litigation. The objective is the provision of appropriate incentives for potential tort-feasors to exert care, when evidence about care is imperfect and may be distorted by the parties. Efficiency is...

Litigation seems to be a Pareto-ineffcient outcome of pretrial bargaining; however, this paper shows that litigation can be the outcome of rational behavior by a litigant and her attorney. If the attorney has more information than his client concerning the characteristics of the lawsuit, the...

We model the settlement of a legal dispute where the trial outcome depends on the behavior of a strategically motivated judge. We consider a standard asymmetric information model where the uninformed defendant makes a take it or leave it offer. If the case goes to trial, the judge decides how...

IntroductionThe "revolving door" is a practice quite widely in use in the United States, in which heads of state agencies, after completing their bureaucratic terms, are entering the very sector they have regulated. This phenomenon is also frequent in France, where it is coined "pantouflage",...

Six main characteristics of an economic order are discussed and empirically evaluated for the case of Slovenia. All of them pertain to the institutional setting ab urbe condita; they comprise the legal and jurisdictional situation, the role of private property, the institutionalised strive at...

I show that legal uncertainty, i.e., uncertainty about the legality of a specific action, has positive welfare effects. Legal uncertainty works as a screening device provided that the threshold of legality is uncertain. The uncertainty discourages controversial actions, while it encourages...

This paper proposes and empirically validates four theories of why legal origin influences growth and welfare through finance. It is a natural extension of "Law and finance: why does legal origin matter?" by Thorsten Beck, Asli Demirgüç-Kunt and Ross Levine (2003). We find only partial support...

This paper assesses how legal origin influences financial development through regulation quality and the rule of law. It employs all the dimensions identified by the Financial Development and Structure Database of the World Bank. The law channels are instrumented with legal origins to account...

The "revolving door" phenomenon has become very common in most industrialised countries, and is leading to conflicts of interest as well as economic distortions. The purpose of this paper is to develop an indicator of the distortionary effects of the revolving door - The Revolving Door Indicator...

In this article, I use a unique dataset consisting of listed Indian firms that have been indicted for economic malpractice/default or have been non-compliant with laws/ regulations/ guidelines to estimate the stock price impact of regulatory actions against corporate irregularities. The sample...