This paper examines the law and economics of third-party financed litigation. I explore the conditions under which a system of third-party financiers and litigators can enhance social welfare, and the conditions under which it is likely to reduce social welfare. Among the applications I consider...

The ad hoc institutional configurations that facilitated the resolution of sovereign insolvency for over thirty years are fragmenting. In the absence of an acceptable alternative, the recent pari passu decision reveals the dangers of common law courts pressured to enforce contracts and paper...

In today's regulatory environment, a corporation engaged in wrongdoing can be sure of one thing: regulators will point to an ineffective compliance program as a key cause of institutional misconduct. The explosion in the importance of compliance is unsurprising given the emphasis that...

Because third-party funding and sales of legal rights are equivalent in terms of their economics, I examine arrangements in which third-party sales of legal rights are permitted today – waiver, subrogation, and settlement agreements. The existing arrangements provide valuable lessons for the...

Mechanism design provides a general paradigm for deriving legal rules and institutions that implement social objectives as equilibrium outcomes of interactions among strategic individuals with private information and endogenous transaction costs. This paper designs mechanisms that generalize...

The Coase Theorem predicts that, if there are no transaction costs, parties will always contract their way to an efficient outcome. Thus, no matter which legal rules society chooses, "Coasean bargains" will lead to efficient results. There are always some transaction costs. However, transaction...

A common phenomenon in tax administration in developing countries is that tax is collected not according to the rules of law but according to informal agreements between taxpayers and tax collectors. This article offers a novel explanation of this phenomenon in the Chinese context in terms of...

The Coase theorem tells us that monetary damages and specific performance remedies for breach of contract have identical effects when transaction costs are zero. This has become a standard part of the literature on the economics of contract law. This note argues that the traditional view is...

In this chapter, I distill some elements of the demand and supply of institutions designed to reduce transaction costs in the ancient world. I some cases, contractual parties could reduce transaction cost by accurately designing contracts. In other cases, the failure of private coordination...