Can language be centrally planned and controlled? Friedrich Hayek considered language the archetypal example of spontaneous order, yet many countries adopt a planned order approach to language, attempting to centrally plan and control it through language academies. I collect original data on the...

Across areas of law administrative agencies employ four basic policymaking strategies: rulemaking, adjudication, advance ruling and licensing. How should administrative agencies choose among these policymaking strategies? I develop a model which captures the idea that rules are inherently...

How should fringe benefits be taxed? Though fringe benefits are covered in every basic law school course on federal income taxation, no widely accepted economic framework has developed for thinking about their taxation. As a result, policymakers lack a clear picture of the benefits and costs of...

What is the purpose of tax deductions? A common view among tax law scholars is that tax deductions are required to properly measure income. I present an alternative theory of tax deductions, relying on standard economic efficiency grounds. I develop a model which highlights the fact that...

A well-known result in economic analysis of contract law is that expectation damages lead to over-reliance by the non-breaching party. Recently, the contractual disgorgement remedy has attracted much attention from scholars, yet no attempt has been made to analyze reliance investment under this...

Why do some countries mandate a long maternity leave, while others mandate only a short one? In a standard mandated benefits model mandated maternity leave makes hiring women more costly, and therefore reduces women's employment and real wages. We incorporate into the standard model society's...

Although administrative law doctrine requires courts to defer to an agency’s reasonable statutory interpretation, the doctrine is unclear as to whether an agency gets less deference when it changes its own prior interpretation. We formally analyze how judicial deference to revised agency...

Many statutes are administered by administrative agencies. This paper shows that, when interpreting an ambiguous statute, administrative agencies choose between two strategies of statutory interpretation: the risky strategy - a relatively aggressive interpretation that provokes an appeal by the...

How should administrative agencies choose among the different policymaking instruments at their disposal? Although the administrative law literature has explored this question with respect to the instruments of adjudication and rulemaking, it has failed to appreciate two other powerful...