This Article considers the effects of law within a Keynesian macroeconomic model on the economy. Using the IS/LM model at the heart of “short-run” macroeconomics, I argue that law affects spending (“aggregate demand”) and that the changes in spending induced by law can affect output. I...

Governments should embrace randomized trials to estimate the efficacy of different laws and regulations. Just as random assignment of treatments is the most powerful method of testing for the causal impact of pharmaceuticals, randomly assigning individuals or firms to different legal rules can...

Existing research suggests that practicing litigators are too confident in the merits of their clients’ cases. But practicing attorneys often self select (1) the area of law in which they practice, (2) the side on which to practice within that area, (3) law firms with whom they practice, and...

The limited capacity of lawmakers to intuit the unstated wishes of contracting parties constitutes a daunting obstacle to the formulation of majoritarian default rules. This paper presents a field experiment that prices consumers’ unstated understandings of contractual silence regarding...

This note examines how the income tax code can be altered to stabilize the economy in the face of fluctuations. First, the note suggests that tax expenditures for goods with high income elasticities should be replaced with government spending, while tax expenditures for inferior goods should be...

Rationalist analysis of policymaking, exemplified in cost-benefit analysis, ignores the variance in outcomes associated with policies and seeks to maximize expected outcomes. Burkeans, by contrast, view policy outcome uncertainty negatively. The Burkean approach is echoed in the precautionary...

We conducted a survey to assess Americans’ preferences for revenue increases and spending cuts. A representative sample of 1,000 Americans completed the survey in December 2012. Respondents had a specific deficit reduction goal: cut the projected 2022 deficit by $900 billion, or by two-thirds....

Tax expenditure estimates are viewed with skepticism even within the fraught business of forecasting the revenue effects of policies. As the Joint Committee on Taxation emphasizes, Unlike revenue estimates, tax expenditure estimates do not incorporate any behavioral response of taxpayers or...

This Article identifies and examines two alternative institutional structures for hierarchical institutions — “bounded” vs. “unbounded” institutional structures. In a bounded structure, a principal decides on a bounded numerical allocation and then an agent allocates to subjects while...

Conventional wisdom says that lawyers are uniquely unhappy. Unfortunately, this conventional wisdom rests on a weak empirical foundation. The “unhappy lawyers” narrative relies on nonrandom survey data collected from volunteer respondents. Instead of depending on such data, researchers...