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

We examine whether the perceived ethnoreligious origin of defendant's name matters for criminal justice outcomes. Drawing on data on adjudication of drug offenses in Belgium, we find that defendants with a perceived Islamic name face on average three to five percentage points greater prospects of conviction than defendants with a Belgian name. The name effect is not discernible with respect to sentence

We inquire experimentally whether asymmetric information in competitive settings and competition per se influence individual social behaviour. Participants perform a task and are remunerated according to two schemes, a non-competitive and a competitive one, then they play a standard public goods game. In the first scheme participants earn a flat remuneration, in the other they are ranked according

We investigate the economic consequences of the traditio and the contract principle—differing in how they determine the priority rights for an item sold but not delivered. Our results suggest that the two principles are equivalent in terms of the net utilities enjoyed by involved actors. For example, a lower price paid for a forward transaction under a traditio principle can be compensated by better

Real world contracts often contain incentive clauses that fail to fully specify conditions triggering payments, giving rise to legal disputes. When complete contract generate Pareto efficient allocations the L&E literature advocates that courts should fill in the missing clauses. This logic does not directly extend to environments with moral hazard, where complete contracts result in constrained efficient

Previous research has not explained the use of real option clause in franchise contracting. The real option clause has two economic functions: To reduce transaction costs by mitigating opportunism risk and to increase strategic rents by exploiting the profit potential from future upside opportunities under uncertainty. We argue that franchisors will more likely use a real option clause (ROC) in franchise

This paper explores how consumers’ moral and image concerns influence the equilibrium in a product-accident model in which third parties incur harm. We differentiate results according to whether the product is supplied by a monopolistic firm or competitive ones. Assuming incomplete compensation of third parties, we find that both moral and image concerns of consumers increase product safety in the

As the amount of regulation continues to increase and private security firms play a more and more vital role in a modern society’s security, policy makers and practitioners acknowledge the need for sound research. Moreover, studying regulation and private security industry dynamics can enable a better alignment of regulation to its objectives, namely to control abusive and corrupt conduct of some private

In recent years, important concerns have been raised about the increasing capabilities of pricing algorithms to make use of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. Two issues have gained particular attention: algorithmic price discrimination (PD) and algorithmic tacit collusion (TC). Although the risks and opportunities of both practices have been explored extensively in the literature, neither

Some applications of Nash bargaining in the antitrust analysis of reverse payment settlements estimate the bargaining power parameter as the split of the surplus in the actual settlement with alleged reverse payments. This estimated parameter is then used as the bargaining power parameter in the but-for world where reverse payments are prohibited. We demonstrate that this approach is incorrect. Indeed