It is generally agreed that boards are endogenously determined institutions that serve both oversight and advisory roles in a firm. While the oversight role of boards has been extensively studied, relatively few studies have examined the advisory role of corporate boards. We examine the...

Politicians are not neutral maximizers of the public good, they respond to incentives just like other individuals. We apply the same reasoning to those politicians in robes called judges. We argue that elected judges, particularly partisan elected judges, have an incentive to redistribute wealth...

After forty years of school consolidation, the preponderance of the evidence, including the results presented in this paper, suggest that the race to reap returns to scale and specialization in education may have come at a high price. This paper uses newly available STAR test score data from...

With the dramatic increase in federal and state environmental regulation in the 1970s, the cost of compliance also rose. While compliance costs have been discussed elsewhere, the implications for the competitiveness of markets have been evaluated using case studies of specific law changes and...

The corporate governance literature is rich with empirical tests of the relation between board composition and firm performance. We consider the effect of board composition on a different measure of performance, the probability a firm will be sued by shareholders. We find firms that are...

"Recent growth in Medicaid spending has forced states to look for ways to slow the program's rate of growth. Under the Medicaid program's rules, state governments must submit a waiver to the federal government in order to implement a cost-saving program. The time required to process a waiver...

We reexamine Mustard and Lott's controversial study on the effect of "shall-issue" gun laws on crime using an empirical standard error function randomly generated from "placebo" laws. We find that the effect of shall-issue laws on crime is much less well-estimated than the Mustard and Lott...

California's Attorney General was pleased to announce that "An unintended but positive consequence of 'Three-Strikes' has been the impact on parolees leaving the state.The growth in the number of parolees leaving California is staggering." Law enforcement officers in other states were presumably...

The Coase theorem presents two criteria for evaluating regulation: regulations efficiency relative to private solutions and how the regulation affects the distribution of wealth. Previous studies of the impact of municipal zoning have focused on Coase’s first criteria: whether zoning raises...

This paper examines the determinants of the EPA's litigation strategy between 1977 and 1996 focusing on the tenure of Ann Gorsuch. Two hypotheses about this period are tested: (1) that changes in the EPA's litigation strategy were in fact an effort to reduce the expected penalty for violating...