Under certain circumstance, a relaxation in occupational licensing standards can increase the quality of those who enter the industry. The effect turns on the opportunity costs of preparing for the licensing examination: making the test easier can increase the quality of those passing if it...

We examine the role of non-practicing entities (NPEs), often called patent trolls, in patent litigation. We present a theoretical model that predicts that cases with NPE patentees resolve faster. We test this prediction using a hand-collected data set of US patent litigation cases. We find that...

This paper studies costs and benefits of firm networks, and related industrial policies, with a focus on the �network contract� recently introduced in the Italian legislation. Incentives to networks creation could be useful to foster future mergers, but may prove ineffective as a...

Objectives: Previous studies have argued that marriage, parenthood and employment are important factors that lead to desistance from crime. However, the effects of these events only apply to those experiencing them and do not necessarily explain why the majority of desisters stop offending. In...

The local public administration, like any other field of activity, knows a certain regulation determined by the specificity of this field and by its importance within the global social system. The norms governing local public administration are included in the fundamental act, as well as other...

When there are three parties, it is well known that the Coase Theorem may not hold even when there are no transaction costs, due to the emptiness of the core of the corresponding cooperative game [Aivazian and Callen (1981)]. We show that the standard Coasean bargaining game involving three...

This paper investigates the effect of local immigration enforcement regimes on the migration decisions of the foreign-born. Specifically, the analysis uses individual-level American Community Survey data to examine the effect of recent 287(g) agreements, which allow state and local law...

L’article propose une analyse comparative du traitement de la question coloniale par les anciens et les néo-institutionnalistes nord-américains. Dans le cas des anciens institutionnalistes, le sujet colonial est indissociable de la question raciale. L’article montre également une...

The thesis that judges could (voluntarily or not) promote efficiency through their decisions has largely been discussed since Posner put it forward in the early 1970s. There nonetheless remains a methodological aspect that has never (to our knowledge) been analyzed in relation to the...

We model the settlement of a legal dispute when the trial outcome depends on the behavior of a strategically motivated judge. A defendant, who is uninformed about the level of harm that he has caused, makes a take-it-or-leave-it offer to an informed plaintiff. If the parties cannot agree on a...