This paper investigates the effect of changes in state prudent trust investment laws on asset allocation in noncommercial trusts. The old prudent-man rule favored “safe†investments and disfavored “speculation†in stock. The new prudent-investor rule directs trustees to craft...

Attitudes of conformity can be understood as a product of adaptation. Existing models of conformity invoke preference falsification with individuals hiding their true preferences. We posit an adaptive mechanism for conformity. Because non-conformity leads to costs as a dissenting individual is...

Single-firm event studies play an important role in both scholarship and litigation despite the general invalidity of standard inference. We use a broad cross-section of 2000--2007 CRSP data and find that the standard approach performs poorly in terms of both Type I and Type II error rates. We...

Economic theory predicts that abortion laws affect sexual behavior since they change the marginal cost of having risky sex. We estimate the impact of abortion laws on sexual behavior by reported gonorrhea incidence. Our data panel includes 41 countries for which consistent gonorrhea data are...

In the law enforcement literature there is a presumption—supported by some experimental and econometric evidence—that criminals are more responsive to increases in the certainty than the severity of punishment. Under a general set of assumptions, this implies that criminals are risk seeking....

While much has been written about inter-jurisdictional competition for tax revenues, especially concerning the choice between harmonization and competition, the literature has largely ignored intra-jurisdiction issues. The few articles examining this issue focus on how lower level governmental...

This article discusses data available for researchers interested in the U.S. civil justice system and illustrates the uses of the various datasets with some interesting findings. Our focus is on torts, defined as an injury to person or property that is not covered by contract and for which civil...

Most industrialized countries have increased access to abortion over the past 30 years. Economic theory predicts that abortion laws affect sexual behavior since they change the marginal cost of having risky sex. We use gonorrhea incidence as a metric of risky sexual behavior. Using a panel of 41...

This paper reviews the existing law and economics literature on crime, noting where various models might apply to the terror context. Specifically, it focuses on two strands of the literature, deterrence and incapacitation. Challenging the conventional application of the basic rational agent...

This paper reviews the existing law and economics literature on crime, noting where various models might apply to the terror context. Specifically, it focuses on two strands of the literature, deterrence and incapacitation. It considers anti-terror measures enacted by different countries,...