Insurance may be uniquely tied up with the law. Social insurance and other public sector insurance arrangements are creatures of statute, governed through administrative law. Private sector insurance arrangements depend upon a well-functioning contract law and a regulated market. Insurance...

Predictability in civil and criminal sanctions is generally understood as desirable. Conversely, unpredictability is condemned as a violation of the rule of law. This paper explores predictability in sanctioning from the point of view of efficiency. It is argued that, given a constant expected...

This article describes and compares two forms of moral regulation employed in connection with insurance institutions. The first governs through moralized personal attributes or pressures like "temptation" and "character." The second governs through moralized institutional or system attributes...

This essay extends to adverse selection the critical attention provided in prior work to moral hazard. Like moral hazard, adverse selection is an old insurance concept that was adopted, formalized, and generalized by economists developing the economics of information. As with moral hazard,...

In the opening essay in Embracing Risk: The Changing Culture of Insurance and Responsibility, Jonathan Simon and I assert that western society is engaged in a transformation from a dominant paradigm of spreading risks to a paradigm that involves embracing risk. (Baker & Simon, eds. 2002) The...

Insurance, we all know, transfers risk. Yet, what we usually think of as a transfer of risk is also a transfer of responsibility. The promise of insurance and other forms of risk management is gaining a measure of control over an uncertain world. Reaching out to insurance institutions for...

Whereas the literature evaluating the effect of tort reforms has focused on reported incurred losses, this paper examines the long run effects using a comprehensive sample by state of individual firms writing medical malpractice insurance from 1984-2003. The long run effects of reforms are...