Conventional wisdom says that lawyers are uniquely unhappy. Unfortunately, this conventional wisdom rests on a weak empirical foundation. The “unhappy lawyers” narrative relies on nonrandom survey data collected from volunteer respondents. Instead of depending on such data, researchers...

This article surveys recent work on the role of law in determining economic aggregates such as gross domestic product, unemployment, inflation, and productivity growth. We provide a brief overview of macroeconomics and discuss how legal interventions and institutional arrangements such as...

This article surveys recent work on the role of law in determining economic aggregates such as gross domestic product, unemployment, inflation, and productivity growth. We provide a brief overview of macroeconomics and discuss how legal interventions and institutional arrangements such as...

Activist investors often run “short slate” proxy contests, seeking representation short of a majority on a corporation’s board of directors. Do activists pursue short slate representation because they want to be an instrumental part of a corporation’s governance, or because success in a...

Courts seeking the most likely intent of contracting parties should interpret contracts according to Bayes’ Rule. The best interpretation of a contract reflects both the prior likelihood (base rate) of a pair of contracting parties having a given intention as well as the probability that the...

In this period of economic uncertainty, tax scholars must examine income tax policy from a macroeconomic perspective. The standard lenses of efficiency and equity no longer suffice. To highlight the importance of the macroeconomic perspective, this Article demonstrates that most tax expenditures...

This paper examines the relation between two means of corporate information aggregation---corporate voting and stock market pricing. If the median voter and the price-setting shareholder share similar information, then close proxy contest outcomes should not have systematic effects on stock...

Empirical studies of corporate governance address potential endogeneity problems, but fail to place endogeneity in the context of a model and ignore the possibility of disparate treatment effects across companies. This paper tackles these defects. The model and analysis in the paper demonstrate...

While much has been made of "shareholder democracy" as a lever of corporate governance, there is little evidence about the efficacy of voting. This paper empirically examines votes on management-sponsored resolutions and finds widespread irregularities in the distribution of votes received by...

This paper studies the "mechanical theory" of crime and incarceration--the notion that changes in imprisonment are partially determined by changes in crime rates. Previous studies found scant evidence supporting the mechanical theory. These studies, however, failed to properly control for...