In the late 1970's, rates of undocumented immigration into the United States increased dra- matically. This increase led to pressure on the federal government to nd some way of dealing with the immigrants, culminating in the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA). This paper seeks to...

We examine a dynamic model of up-or-down problem solving. A decision maker can either spend resources investigating a new problem before deciding what to do, or decide based on similarity with precedent problems. Over time, a decision making framework, or jurisprudence, develops. We focus on the...

This paper models the disclosure of knowledge via licensing to outsiders or fringe firms as a threat, useful in ensuring firms keep their commitments. We show that firms holding intellectual property are better able to enforce agreements than firms that don't. In markets requiring innovation to...

We examine a dynamic model of up-or-down problem solving. A decision maker can either spend resources investigating a new problem before deciding what to do or decide on the basis of similarity with precedent problems. Over time, a decision-making framework, or jurisprudence, develops. We focus...

This paper is an economic analysis of cause lawyering, in which lawyers seek social change through the courts. The lawyer’s litigation strategy consists of deciding how many steps in the law to ask the court to move at a single moment. We find that more intense advocates prefer to ask for a...

Risk management is fundamental to the success of a major project. However, the variations in using risk management practices are considerable and are dependent on numerous factors such as the industry sector, the size of the project, and the stage in the project life cycle. One of the major...

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This article presents a strategic model of liability and litigation under court errors. Our framework allows for endogenous choice of level of care and endogenous likelihood of filing and disputes. We derive sufficient conditions for a unique universally divine mixed-strategy perfect Bayesian...

Research firms disclose a surprisingly large amount of information to the patent office through "targeted" disclosures, that is, disclosures intended to make the patent office aware of potentially patentable information. Conventional wisdom holds that these disclosures are made for defensive...

Using a straight-forward Differences-in-Differences approach, effects of the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act and the 1986 and 1987 Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Acts on mortality levels in California are examined. These acts had the effect of legalizing and granting healthcare coverage...