Business law deals with the creation of new businesses and the issues that arise as existing businesses interact with the public, other companies, and the government. This area of the law draws on a variety of legal disciplines, including tax law, intellectual property, real estate, sales,...

In bringing economic analysis to bear on whether a dispute is settled without trial, the presumed institutional setting is typically one of private property where the parties are residual claimants to their legal expenses. Many disputes, however, are between private and public parties. In these...

Cooperatives represent an alternative to large-scale corporate farms and plantations as well as to independent unaffiliated small private farms. This paper presents a comparative modeling narrative on cooperative organizational forms' potential impact on equitable rural development. This speaks...

This short article addresses recent attempts by liquidators to incorporate the costs of running the liquidation into proceedings against directors for breaches of directors' duties. Taking New Zealand's companies (corporations) legislation as its starting point, it considers recent New Zealand...

The effects of pre-play communication in a coordination game with incomplete information about players' intensity of preferences are compared to no communication controls. Pre-play communication significantly increases subjects' payoffs and the probability of coordination, while reducing...

We investigate the internal workings of U.S. corporate governance with a hand-collected dataset of director resignations that are related to power struggles within the board. About two-thirds of the conflicts arise because of how board members interact in carrying out their duties, while most of...

Common property arrangements have long been considered inefficient and short lived, since they encourage high-productivity individuals to leave and shirking among those who stay. In contrast, kibbutzim | voluntary common property settlements in Israel | have lasted almost a century. Recently,...

In a hand-coded sample of M&A contracts from 2007-08, risk allocation provisions exhibit wide variation. Earn-outs are the least common means to allocate risk, indemnities are most common, followed by price adjustment clauses. Techniques for mitigating enforcement costs – escrows, holdbacks,...

Ownership dispersion is a first-order determinant of M&A practices. Firms with dispersed ownership are more salient, and tend to be larger, but dispersion varies significantly among even large US businesses, and affects M&A deal size, duration, techniques, contract terms, and outcomes. These...

If contracting within the firm is incomplete, managers will expend resources on trying to appropriate a share of the surplus that is generated. We show that outside ownership may alleviate the deadweight losses associated with such costly distributional conflict, even if all it does is add...