Event studies are among the most successful uses of econometrics in policy analysis. By providing an anchor for measuring the impact of events on investor wealth, the methodology offers a fruitful means for evaluating the welfare implications of private and government actions. This paper is the...

Part I of this Article provides an overview of path dependence theory. It outlines the theory and briefly describes three separate strands of the theory: increasing returns path dependence, evolutionary path dependence, and sequencing path dependence, which are rooted in the economics,...

Behavioral Law and Economics has become an increasingly prominent field within legal scholarship, and most recently within the corporate area. A behavioral bias of particular relevance in corporate contexts is the differential between individuals' willingness to pay to obtain a legal entitlement...

The central allocative decision confronting a judge in a nuisance dispute should not concern the identity of the initial entitlement recipient but rather the identity of the more efficient chooserthe litigant who can more efficiently allocate the entitlement. We show that liability rules can...

Economic theories of legal compliance emphasize legal sanctions, while psychological and sociological theories stress the perceived legitimacy of law. Without disputing the importance of either mechanism, we test a third way that law affects behavior, an expressive theory that claims law...

This paper examines the factors that affect the decision of U.S. companies to issue securities offshore compared with inside the United States. Utilizing a data set of 1,444 domestic private placements and offshore offerings from 1993 to 1997, the paper reports that firms that experienced a...

This Article argues that recent developments in economic theory provide a new rationale for the dichotomous approach of land use arrangements in the law of servitudes that is almost universal in the modern Western legal tradition. The treatment of certain land-related promises as enforceable...

Criminal law can justly lay claim to being the native domain of law and economics. From Bentham to Becker, no area of law has been more brightly illuminated by the radiance of economic logic.Not coincidentally, in no other area of the law has the conflict between economics and ordinary moral...

Trust implies confidence, but not certainty, that some person or institution will behave in an expected way. A trusting person decides to act in spite of uncertainty about the future and doubts about the reliability of others' promises. The need for trust arises from human freedom. As Piotr...

The Logic of Collective Action has for decades supplied the logic of public policy analysis. In this pioneering application of public choice theory, Mancur Olson ele gantly punctured the premise -- shared by a diverse variety of political theories -- that individuals can be expected to act...