In most of the contract theory literature, contracting costs are assumed either to be high enough to preclude certain forms of contracting, or low enough to permit any contract to be written. Similarly, researchers usually treat renegotiation as either costless or prohibitively costly. This...

Under standard accounts of corporate governance, capital markets play a significant role in monitoring management performance and, where appropriate, replacing management whose performance does not measure up. While the concept of a market for corporate control was once controversial, now even...

For many decades, scholars have puzzled over why the market for judicial clerks has been characterized by increasingly early bidding, with interviews and offers extended at progressively early points in a student's law school career. An important article published recently by Jolls, Avery, Judge...

Legislation creating or reinforcing resale royalties for visual artists retains substantial political popularity, particularly in the European Union -- despite the often skeptical attitude toward those rights in the economics literature. In this essay, we probe more deeply the affirmative...

We consider a model of crime with rational Bayesian Jurors. We find that if jurors are not perfectly informed, even when there is no limit to the size of the punishment that can be imposed, it is not possible to deter all crime. There is a finite lower bound on the crime rate which results from...

In recent years, patent protection has extended into new areas, giving rise to serious concern about the lack of clear guidelines for patentability. We analyze the effect of introducing a patent opposition process that would allow patent validity to be challenged directly after a patent is...

This paper advocates opening up international securities regulation to greater regulatory competition than the scant competition that exists at present. After sketching the contours of an international regime of regulatory competition in securities laws and the reasons why such competition is...

Abortion may prevent the birth of "unwanted" children, who would have relatively small investments in human capital and a higher probability of crime. On the other hand, some research suggests that legalizing abortion increases out-of-wedlock births and single parent families, which implies the...

This paper is the second part of a review of the event study methodology, which has proved to be one of the most successful uses of econometrics in policy analysis. In this part we focus on the methodology's application to corporate law and corporate governance issues. Event studies have played...

When insider trading prohibitions limit the ability of insiders (or of a corporation itself) to use material non-public information to trade a particular firm's stock, there may be incentive to use the information to trade instead on the stock of that firm's rivals, suppliers, customers, or the...