State tort laws that govern the apportionment of damages from accidents often bar potential plaintiffs who played even a minor causal role in the accident from recovering damages from other culpable parties. However, anecdotal evidence suggests that judges and juries fail to enforce the letter...

'Defensive medicine' is a potentially serious social problem: if fear of liability drives health care providers to administer treatments that do not have worthwhile medical benefits, then the current liability system may generate inefficiencies much larger than the costs of compensating...

Social costs created by delay in the resolution of legal disputes have motivated an extensive theoretical literature studying the causes of delay. However, much less work has investigated a related, more policy-relevant question: how do legal institutions empirically affect delay in settlement?...

Do birth order and the size of one's childhood family influence environment, thereby potentially affecting future achievement? This article investigates the hypothesis that they do, presenting two major empirical findings. First, neither birth order nor childhood family size significantly...

In blended hybrid systems distinct micro- or nanostructured materials can be formed by phase separation. Network structures of particles or rods in a polymer matrix can be developed via self-assembly. We use this blending approach to compare active materials for application in solar cell...

Health care report cards' public disclosure of patient health outcomes at the level of the individual physician or hospital or bothmay address important informational asymmetries in markets for health care, but they may also give doctors and hospitals incentives to decline to treat more...