During the last couple of decades, courts have intervened in employment relationships by allowing employees to circumvent the workers' compensation liability restrictions. Recent papers point to firms' divesting themselves of operations whose employees handled dangerous substances as a way of...

This paper shows that allowing wealthy individuals to influence the outcome of their trials through the purchase of legal services can be consistent with the optimal penalty literature. Using this analysis, the author reviews some of the advantages and disadvantages of varying the length of jail...

This paper shows that most of the large recent increases in campaign spending for federal and state offices can be explained by higher government spending. This result holds for both federal and state legislative campaigns and gubernatorial races and across many different specifications. The...

Despite all the work on how campaign donations influence a politician's behavior, the nagging question of whether contributions alter how the politician votes or whether these contributions constitute support for like-minded individuals remains unresolved. By combining the campaign contributions...

The existing literature ignores the fact that the marginal return to current campaign expenditures depends on the candidate's stock of brand name. This simple observation is then used to provide a possible explanation for the negative empirical relationship observed between an incumbent's...

It is frequently assumed that safe-storage gun laws reduce accidental gun deaths and total suicides, while the possible impact on crime rates is ignored. We find no support that safe-storage laws reduce either juvenile accidental gun deaths or suicides. Instead, these storage requirements appear...

We examine several theoretical and empirical issues concerning punitive damage awards and their importance to business. First, we argue that previous justifications of punitive damage awards ignore the role of private contracting and reputation in assuring contractual performance. In the absence...