Nearly all the empirical literature on tort liability in the healthcare sector focuses on physicians. This paper is among the first to focus on products liability litigation against drug companies. We model and estimate the welfare effects of failure-to-warn suits, the most common type of tort...

Despite claims of a judicial funding crisis, there exists little direct evidence linking judicial budgets to court utilization. Using data on thousands of auto injuries covering a 15-year period, the authors measure the relationship between state-level court expenditures and the propensity of...

Product liability law reduces the costs of accidents to consumers thus reducing their incentive to invest in safety. We estimate the impact of tort liability on a subset of consumers who have significant control over the probability of an accident, the consumers of general aviation aircraft. The...

Every year thousands of firms are engaged in research joint ventures (RJV), where all knowledge gained through R&D is shared among members. Most of the empirical literature assumes members are non-cooperative in the product market. But many RJV members are rivals leaving open the possibility...

State governments tend to discriminate against out-of-state residents. States that attract a lot of tourists, for example, tend to rely more heavily than other states on hotel, food, and other taxes that fall primarily on out-of-state visitors. The authors examine whether tax exporting also...

Reports about runaway jury awards have become so common that it is widely accepted that the US jury system needs to be 'fixed.' Proposals to limit the right to a jury trial and increase judicial discretion over awards implicitly assume that judges decide cases differently than juries. We show...

According to the conventional wisdom, a revolving door operates between government and industry. High ranking government officials leave office and head for Washington law firms or major corporations where they use their connections and influence to further their new employers' political...

A judge facing exogenous constraints on his pecuniary income has an incentive to reduce his workload to increase his private welfare. In the face of an increase in caseload, this incentive will induce judges to attempt to terminate some cases more rapidly. In class action cases, failing to grant...

The use of “pay-for-delay” settlements in patent litigation – in which a branded manufacturer and generic entrant settle a Paragraph IV patent challenge and agree to forestall entry – has come under considerable scrutiny in recent years. Critics argue that these settlements are collusive...

The value of lawyers to their clients is notoriously difficult to estimate due to endogeneity. We utilize modifications to the collateral source (CS) rule that require reducing trial awards by the amount of payments from first-party insurance as an instrument for hiring a lawyer. The problem...