This Article develops an agency costs theory of the law of private trusts, focusing chiefly on donative trusts. The agency costs approach offers fresh insights into recurring problems in trust law including, among others, modification and termination, settlor standing, fiduciary litigation,...

We view a contract as a list of outcomes. Ex ante, the parties commit not to consider outcomes not on the list, i.e., these are quot;ruled outquot;. Ex post, they freely bargain over outcomes on the list, i.e., the contract specifies no mechanism to structure their choice; in this sense outcomes...

This paper extends Professor Margaret Blair and Lynn Stout's pathbreaking Team Production Theory of Corporate Law to the bankruptcy reorganization of public companies. The paper begins by describing the prevailing contractarian theory of bankruptcy reorganization, the Creditors' Bargain theory...

Recent theoretical work suggests that outside investor control may have costs as well as benefits, particularly in small, entrepreneurial firms. The possibility of investor opportunism can reduce an entrepreneur's incentives to invest personal effort into the firm. I investigate this issue in...

Recent theoretical work suggests that outside equity monitoring and control come with costs as well as benefits, especially in small, entrepreneurial firms. These costs arise when outside investors undervalue any private benefits of control that may accrue to an entrepreneur. The resulting...

Titling systems are the institutions used to enforce property rights as rights in rem and reduce the cost of transacting on them. To be effective in non-local markets, they require a registry, which produces information on claims or rights, thus allowing the judge to verify them, establish their...

This interdisciplinary paper by a mathematician and a legal counsel, both from the Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University, discusses the potential impacts of the so-called “initial coin offerings”, and of several developments based on distributed ledger technology (“DLT”), on corporate...

I study the effect of timing of negotiation on the resolution of the hold-up problem. I show that the investor can invest optimally, if the non-investor can commit to initiate negotiation in a specific time period. This way I demonstrate that contracting parties can use negotiation timing...

Worldwide, there are many Indigenous communities who distrust the Natural Resources industry due to historical economic, environmental, social, and cultural practices. These communities also often distrust National and Sub-National governments that regulate these industries. At the same time,...

The contractual, single-exchange framework in Coase (1960) contains the implicit assumption that exchange in property rights does not affect future transaction (i.e., trading) costs. This is pertinent for analyzing use externalities but limits our understanding of property institutions: a...