The COVID-19 pandemic has not only caused millions to die and even more to lose their jobs, it has also prompted more governments to simultaneously declare a state of emergency than ever before enabling us to compare their decisions more directly. States of emergency usually imply the extension of executive powers that diminishes the powers of other branches of government, as well as to the civil liberties

We argue that institutions are bundles that involve trade-offs in the government’s ability to provide public goods that affect public health. We hypothesize that the institutions underlying economic freedom affect the mix of diseases by reducing diseases of poverty relative to diseases of commerce (those associated with free movement of people, such as smallpox or COVID-19). We focus on smallpox and

We offer the first systematic inquiry into the role of caseload for efficacy of judicial enforcement, a critical but underexplored stage of the judicial process. We first develop a stylized model that elucidates the interrelated nature of judicial effort choice in enforcement versus adjudication. We then examine the model's prediction using data from labor courts in Brazil, where inefficacious judicial

Evidence emerging from our novel in-prison survey shows that non-criminal legal problems of prison inmates mainly relate to family law matters, contract liability, and administrative procedures. The rate of subjects who face legal issues increases after imprisonment. Employing logit estimation techniques, we test the hypothesis according to which isolation due to imprisonment obstructs legal problem

After a long period of economic and legal transition, new institutions emerged in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). Firms facing financial difficulties must cope with the quality of those institutions. This study investigates the association between the institutional environment and a firm’s recovery from financial distress.Ki Our analysis relies on a sample of 823 CEE listed firms subject to financial

Accepting the argument made by Manne, Epstein and others that firms wishing to allow their employees to insider trade should be permitted to do so, this article shows that there is still a crucial role for government in regulating insider trading. In particular, allowing employees to profit by insider trading is a form of employee compensation that, in contradistinction from conventional forms of equity

Twenty-five years ago Richard Epstein published Simple Rules for a Complex World, which would go on to become one of Epstein’s most influential works. This essay, prepared for a conference and symposium to celebrate the anniversary of the book, applies the insights of Simple Rules in the context of one of the most complex areas of social and economic regulation, financial regulation. The complexity

It is often claimed that rewards for whistleblowers lead to fraudulent reports, but for several US programs this has not been a major problem. We model the interaction between rewards for whistleblowers, sanctions against fraudulent reporting, judicial errors, and standards of proof in the court case on a whistleblower’s allegations and the possible follow-up for fraudulent allegations. Balancing whistleblower

The complexity of the U.S. income tax system emerged in part from the differentiated fiscal treatment of specific investments and various sorts of business expenditures that, as Richard Wagner says, creates “a tax code so large that no one can read it and which creates nearly a unique tax liability for each taxpayer.” While tax scholarship documents the costs of complexity, current scholarship lacks

There is plenty of evidence that judicial efficiency reduces credit rationing and increases lending. In contrast, inefficient courts may lead to borrowers’ opportunistic behavior and, as a result, decrease loan performance and the availability of credit. We combine caseload data from commercial courts in Serbia with micro-data on company loans to study the impact of judicial efficiency on loan performance

Electricity and water tariffs are undergoing significant changes due to smart metering, retail competition, and regulatory changes. Consumers now have to choose between different tariffs which are getting more and more complex. Theoretically, these new tariffs aim to use more cost-reflective pricing to incentivise consumers to adopt the right behaviours. However, empirical evidence from real pricing

The original version of this article unfortunately contained a mistake. The name of corresponding author Mario Mario Rizzo was incorrect. The correct name should be Mario J. Rizzo.

This paper studies the effect of an emission tax on the relocation decision in a duopoly with vertical product differentiation. We establish the relationship between an exogenous product quality markup, relocation cost, and emission taxation in a two-country-setting for three cases: (a) an environmental tax set only by one country, (b) non-cooperative environmental taxation in both countries, and (c)

This essay compares two alternative economic theories of crime, due to Becker (1968) and Adelstein (2017), which differ with respect to the purpose of punishment. Both models are based on the idea of rational offenders and punishments as prices, but they part company with respect to how the level of punishment is, or should be, determined. Whereas Becker’s approach is based on the normative goal of

The basic “simple rules” thesis holds that most legal relationships can be reduced to questions of autonomy, property acquisition, contract and tort on the private law side, and eminent domain and taxation on the public law side. This paper extends that analysis in three directions. First, it explains how a single-owner model drives this basic set of entitlements under conditions of universal consent

Epstein (Simple rules for a complex world, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1995) defended the superiority of simple legal rules over complex, human-designed regulations. Has Epstein’s case for simple rules become obsolete with the arrival of artificial intelligence, and in particular machine learning (ML)? Can ML deliver better algorithmic rules than traditional simple legal rules? This paper

In the context of international investment disputes, this paper investigates how arbitrator team characteristics affect team performance in solving disputes between a host country and a foreign investor. Our data include 277 judgments issued by arbitrator teams at the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes at the World Bank from 1972 to 2018. The time to resolution and the quality

The goal of this paper is to identify factors which affect judges’ productivity and career choice motives with the view of increasing judicial efficiency. Specifically, the investigation focuses on such aspects as judges’ remuneration, promotion, threat of judgment revocation, service/mission, periodic assessment, the threat of a complaint about protracted proceedings or of disciplinary proceedings

National and international criminal courts often choose to focus prosecutions on the heads of organizations that commit international crimes. In this article we consider a game between a law enforcement authority and a head of a criminal organization who decides on his level of personal exposure to crime and the number of individual criminals he recruits. Our results highlight that, depending on the

This article addresses the question—What is the structure of rules required to undergird a complex dynamic system of actions such as the market economy? The idea of simplicity does not adequately highlight the particular characteristics that the rules must possess. Instead, this article explores the key requirement of abstractness. This is a multifaceted concept. It manifests itself in the abstract

The music industry has been made possible through performing rights based on a law introduced by the post-revolutionary French national assembly in 1791. However, it took until the mid-nineteenth century until a system of royalty collection was established in France (and another half a century or more in other countries). In France, this new system for non-dramatic performing rights was preceded by

In this paper the impact of legislation on the GDP growth rate is investigated, both before and after the great economic and financial crisis of 2007–2008. The analysis has been performed using data from the twenty Italian regions from 1995 to 2016. Using several econometric models, the most significant result shows that flows of legislation can push economic growth into a recovery phase of the business

Friedrich Hayek devoted the later part of his career to investigating the legal rules required for the existence of a free society. The subject of this paper is Hayek’s treatment of legal positivism, which he thought was the most important intellectual movement responsible for the decline of liberal institutions in Europe in the early twentieth century. As shown in the paper, Hayek’s critique consists

This paper endeavors to examine the basic idea in Richard Epstein’s book Simple Rules for a Complex World. It does so by considering a specific simple rule which was explicitly designed for complex world. A basic idea in Epstein’s book is that the more complex is the world the better is the case for simple rules. To show this, he develops six simple rules pertaining to the rights of individuals, first

This paper examines the incentives for, and economic impact of related-party transactions (RPTs) by controlling shareholders (CSHs) of corporate groups. We analyze a theory model of RPTs transacted on ‘market terms’ by two affiliate firms in a group, one of which belongs to an upstream and the other to a downstream market. We show that RPTs of this kind, although non-advantageous to the CSH of the

This paper investigates how the European Union and Spanish changes to the regulation and the declaration of some unfair terms in mortgage loan agreements have affected the valuation of the Spanish banking industry. This paper has a dual legal and economic focus, and could consequently be of interest not only to financial institutions but also to the administrator of justice, which oversees the correct

One of the major challenges that result from the digital transformation occurring in our societies bears on its impact on the organization and regulation of the economy. This leads to a dramatic change to the economic institutions of capitalism—into what could be defined as platform capitalism—that rests on a fundamental dilemma between ‘decentralization’ on the one side and ‘concentration’ on the

The existing literature identifies different indicators to construct organized crime indices and places equal importance to different concepts of organized crime. This paper examines the sensitivity of organized crime across Italian provinces when different set of indicators and weights are used to combine crime indicators. Our findings suggest that there is a remarkable variation in the distribution

In the current paper, we discuss the need for regulation at EU level of Connected and Automated Driving solutions (henceforth CAD) based on multiple considerations, namely (i) the need for uniformity of criteria across European Member States, and (ii) the impact that regulation—or the absence of it—has on the proliferation of specific technological solutions. The analysis is grounded on legal and economic

This paper explores some of the reasons why capitalism experiences periodic crises of legitimacy and asks whether Richard Epstein’s “simple rules” heuristic can help. The current legitimacy problem is exacerbated by the fact that we are also in a low growth situation. This means that some policy instruments that could have been used to increase legitimacy may no longer be available. The “simple rules”

This paper investigates the influence of women in politics on decision-making using public educational expenditures as the outcome of interest. The results suggest that an increase in the share of female legislators by one percentage point increases the ratio of educational expenditures to GDP by 0.038 percentage points. I then consider some different contexts, under which the influence of female legislators