This paper investigates the incentive effects of automobile insurance, compulsory insurance laws, and no-fault liability laws on driver behavior and traffic fatalities. We analyze a panel of 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia from 1970-1998, a period in which many states adopted...

Non-economic damages (pain and suffering) are the most significant and variable components of liability. Our survey of 51 U.S. jurisdictions shows wide heterogeneity in whether attorneys may quantify damages as time-units of suffering (“per diem”) or demand a specific amount (“lump...

This Article represents the first empirical study of the effects of bad-faith laws on claims decisionmaking by insurance companies. One of the most notable and debated developments in the law of tort and insurance since the 1970s has been the recognition in many states of an extracontractual...

The German Environmental Liability Law (ELL) of 1991 has introduced far-reaching civil liability for environmental damages with the aim to increase firms? efforts to prevent accidents. Previous studies find poor evidence that this goal has actually been achieved. One and a half decades after the...

This article is based on my keynote address at the American Academy of Economic and Financial Experts conference in which I examined some of the implications for legal contexts of my book, Pricing Lives: Guideposts for a Safer Society. The value of a statistical life (VSL) provides an economic...

The correct value for the net discount rate has been a topic of controversy among forensic economists. Based on available historical period, use of “total offset” method yields a net discount rate close to zero. Visual inspection of the data suggests the net discount rate exhibits a shift in...

Games with asymmetric information play a prominent role in the theoretical literature of malpractice disputes. The common modeling framework in many papers is a game in extensive form which consists of two stages. In the first stage, one agent makes a settlement demand, and the other agent...

Using standard as well as recently developed univariate and bivariate count data models, this paper analyzes the determinants of workplace accidents using a firm data set for Germany. Given the tight system of public workplace safety regulation, introduced partly as early as in 1869, and the...

The distribution of job satisfaction widened across cohorts of young men in the U.S. between 1978 and 1988, and between 1978 and 1996, in ways correlated with changing wage inequality. Satisfaction among workers in upper earnings quantiles rose relative to that of workers in lower quantiles. An...