When firms collude and charge supra-competitive prices, consumers can bring antitrust lawsuits against the firms. When the litigation cost is low, firms accept the cost as just another cost of doing business, whereas when the cost is high, the firms lower the price to deter litigation. Class...

Why do parties use non-binding agreements? This Article explores the role of nonbinding preliminary agreements in mergers and acquisitions (M&A) deals. It provides a modern, comprehensive account of how and why sophisticated parties use these common bargaining tools, even when they have the...

Court delays are a frequent concern, yet what explains court case duration remains incompletely understood. We study the time to court case resolution by drawing on a detailed case-level dataset of civil suits filed at a major Belgian court. We utilize the competing risks regression framework to...

Judges become ambitious decision makers when they face appellate review. This paper applies a contract theoretic perspective to the behavior of self-interested trial judges in a twolevel court system and analyzes the consequences for contracting in “the shadow of” the court. Confronted with...

In this paper, we conduct an empirical analysis of the impact of better judicial enforcement on the probability of being credit rationed, loan size, and the probability of bankruptcy using household-level data from the Japanese Panel Survey of Consumers, conducted by the Institute for Research...

The decision making of judges is prone to error and misapprehension. Consequently, the prevailing literature ties the economic function of courts to dispute resolution and minimization of rule making costs. In contrast to previous research, this analysis applies a contract theoretic perspective...

With metrics and analytics spreading into every profession and discipline, evidence-based decision-making is on the rise. Legal practice is also concerned by this trend, as reflected in the growing use of quantitative data by law firms with respect to their corporate clients. Based on the...