We study two issues in the enforcement of public law. The first is whether the system of inspections and penalties set by the regulator is effective. The second is whether a better system of inspections and penalties can be designed, given the institutional constraints under which the regulator...

Raising the sanction will always reduce the utility of the criminal. However, raising the sanction will not always lead to less crime, and may lead to more crime. If a criminal has the opportunity to commit multiple criminal acts and has fixed and variable costs of committing these acts, then an...

There has been a wide-spread misconception based on the imprecise wording of Art. 52 of the European Patent Convention (EPC) that the protection of business methods by patents is prohibited in Europe. This paper investigates the legal framework set by patent laws with respect to the...

This article addresses issues that arise in agency law when agents make contracts on behalf of principals. The main issue is whether the principal should be bound when the agent makes a contract with some third party on his behalf which the principal would immediately wish to disavow. The...

The terms of reference for this public inquiry into the Disability Discrimination Act 1992 asked the Commission to look at how effective the Act had been been in achieving its objectives, and to assess the costs and benefits of the Act. In its final assessment, the Commission identified ways in...

Although the executive branch appoints Japanese Supreme Court justices as it does in the United States, a personnel office under the control of the Supreme Court rotates lower court Japanese judges through a variety of posts. This creates the possibility that politicians might indirectly use the...

This paper presents a model of two competing local telecommunications networks, similar in spirit to the model of Laffont, Rey and Tirole(1996). The networks have different attributes which we assume are fixed and the consumers have idiosyncratic tastes for these attributes. The networks are...

Luego de examinar el marco teórico y conceptual de la teoría del crecimiento y del comercio internacional, se mide la eficacia de la apertura comercial impulsada por el TLCAN para fomentar el intercambio comercial. Asimismo, se evalúan los efectos de éste en el crecimiento económico de los...

The concept of multiple-discrimination, particularly as found in the labor market, is fast becoming common parlance among policy-making circles. Understanding discrimination is no longer about uncovering simple and dualistic links between two social groups: it is increasingly apparent that the...