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

The general public often demands more frequent audits and harsher penalties to discourage tax evasion. This paper explores how deterrence via better-equipped tax agencies interrelates with the motivation to voluntarily pay taxes, and how both factors jointly influence tax evasion. For a panel of up to 25 European countries, this paper studies aggregate implications of the Slippery Slope hypothesis

A long history of research on the witchcraft hysteria in Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1692 contends that a group of Puritan ministers, including Salem Village’s Samuel Parris, developed and used the witchcraft hysteria in order to boost religiosity and church attendance in an effort to augment corporate and personal wealth. In carrying out this effort, these ministers pitted churched colonists against

The most common pecuniary sanction, i.e. fixed-fines, places an emphasis on the severity of the crime. This fine has the problem of being either too high for poorer offenders to pay or too low for the richer offenders to be deterred. Day-fines, on the other hand, systematically account for the financial situation of the offender as well as for the severity of his offense. Consequently, it imposes equivalent

The goal of this paper is to analyse determinants of the performance of commercial district courts in Poland in the period 2009–2016 in terms of the number of resolved cases. To this end we apply a panel data approach to identify factors affecting court output (i.e. the number of cases adjudicated) and stochastic frontier analysis to investigate determinants of court efficiency in resolving cases.

The paper addresses the research question of whether black boxes affect the market efficiency, particularly by reducing the level of premiums. The case analyzed is the Italian motor-vehicle insurance market, characterized by the greatest amount of black boxes in the world as a consequence of regulatory interventions that fostered the spread of these kinds of devices. Particularly, using the data provided

The introduction of new varieties of goods increases welfare under certainty and perfect competition. However, when the quality of new goods is uncertain, the need for a regulatory regime on liabilities and hazards arises. We examine the optimality of the regulatory mechanisms of quality under ambiguity (non-uniqueness of the probability distribution). We develop a model showing that product liability

This study proposes a divergent expectation model for patent infringement disputes, where both litigation and settlement are driven by patent quality. Under the model, patent quality depends on both broadness and definiteness of the patent. The model predicts that technologies where the definiteness attribute can be estimated with high accuracy will have higher settlement rates. At trial, it is rather

The paper uses non-experimental longitudinal data to study the effects of participation in the Youth Guarantee programme aimed at fighting youth inactivity in the European Union territory. Particularly, this analysis questions the value of active labour market policy as a valid instrument to help individuals otherwise isolated from the labour market and, thus, at risk of deterioration of human capital

This article presents a model of the lawmakers’ choice between implementing a new content moderation regime that provides for platform liability for user-generated content versus continuing platform immunity for the same. The model demonstrates that lawmakers prefer platform immunity, even if incivility is increasing, if the costs of implementing a platform liability regime are greater than the costs

The volume and fragmentation of the regulatory framework matter for the study of business demography. They may imply that the market is divided, reducing the ability of companies to take advantage of economies of scale and may reduce firm size. This article has two objectives: it analyzes the results of a new database on regulation in Spain and explores the impacts of the complexity of the regulatory

There are legal grounds to hear competitors in merger control proceedings, and competitor involvement has gained significance. To what extent this is economically sensible is the focus of our game-theoretic analysis. The competition authority applies some welfare standard while the competitor cares about its own profit. In expectation, there is neither a pure conflict nor a complete alignment of interest

The legalization of rhino horn ‘domestic’ trade in South Africa potentially unleashes market forces featuring new entry, new tastes and new rhino horn products. This risks escalating the rhino-poaching crisis further. It is argued that institutional contradictions have been engendered by the South African High Court ruling in Kruger and another v Minister of Water and Environmental Affairs and others

On 24 September 2019, in a unanimous judgment the UK Supreme Court ([2019] UKSC 41) ruled that the Prime Minister’s action to prorogue (suspend) Parliament for 5 weeks in the run-up to the 31-10-2019 deadline of the UK leaving the European Union, was unlawful and of no effect, as it prevented Parliament from carrying out its constitutional functions without reasonable justification. Although the Court

In this paper, we trace the survival status of more than 110,000 Russian firms from 2007 to 2015 and examine the relationship between legal forms of incorporation and firm survivability across industries and different periods of economic crisis and growth. Applying the Cox proportional hazards model, we find an optimal legal form that maximizes the probability of firm survival: closed joint-stock companies

Despite ample investigation into the influence of ambient temperature on behavior, and especially on criminal activity, little research exists on the impact of temperature on police behavior. As such, this analysis tests the “heat hypothesis” over 5 years of traffic stops by the City of Pittsburgh Police Department. Across a range of specifications, police officers are more likely to issue traffic

This paper studies the problem of automated classification of fact statements and value statements in written judicial decisions. We compare a range of methods and demonstrate that the linguistic features of sentences and paragraphs can be used to successfully classify them along this dimension. The Wordscores method by Laver et al. (Am Polit Sci Rev 97(2):311–331, 2003) performs best in held out data

We examine the impact of the enforcement of financial regulations by the French Financial Market Authority on sanctioned firms. The early stages of the enforcement process are by law confidential, with an internal investigation and bilateral exchanges between the defendant and its regulator. The public hearing by the Enforcement Committee leads to a single publication of the decision, being the only

We investigate empirically how electoral democracy and judicial independence relate to personal freedom. While judicial independence is positively and robustly related to personal freedom in all its forms, electoral democracy displays a robust, positive relationship with only two out of seven types of personal freedom (freedom of association, assembly and civil society; freedom of expression and information)

Studies of economic growth often refer to “general purpose technology” (GPT), “infrastructure,” and “openness” as keys to improving productivity. Some GPTs, like railroads and the Internet, fit common notions of infrastructure and spawn debates about openness, such as network neutrality. Other GPTs, like the steam engine and the computer, seem to be in a different group that is more modular and open

Empirical legal studies (ELS) is a sibling discipline to law and economics. Conceived by a visionary scholar almost 40 years ago, it has today become a reality. ELS is currently one of the most interesting phenomena in legal academia. We here celebrate its founder Theodore Eisenberg, and provide a glimpse of this important step forward in modern legal scholarship, for a law and economics audience.

This paper analyses the effects of two recent reforms introduced in Italy in 2010 and 2011 in an attempt to reduce prison overcrowding. The first, introduced by the law no. 199 of 2010 on house arrest for prisoners with final conviction. The second, passed by the decree law no. 211 of 2011 on house arrest for criminals arrested awaiting trial. The results of econometric analysis prove that these reforms

The advent of big data analytics has favoured the emergence of forms of price discrimination based on consumers’ profiles and their online behaviour (i.e. personalised pricing). The paper analyses this practice as a possible exploitative abuse by dominant online platforms. The paper argues that, in view of its “mixed” effect on consumers’ welfare, personalised pricing requires a case-by-case assessment

Increased data gathering capacity, together with the spread of data analytics techniques, has prompterd an unprecedented concentration of information related to the individuals’ preferences in the hands of a few gatekeepers. In the present paper, we show how platforms’ performances still appear astonishing in relation to some unexplored data and networks properties, capable to enhance the platforms’

In the absence of well-developed financial markets, bankruptcy procedures provide useful mechanisms to ease and organize the capital transfers of distressed businesses. From an investor’s perspective, such court-supervised ways of solving financial distress are part of the attractiveness of the post-transition economies that eventually integrated the European Union. This article originally analyzes

What is Coase’s understanding of transaction costs in economic theory and history? Our argument in this paper is twofold, one theoretical and the other empirical. First, Coase regarded positive transaction costs as the beginning, not the end, of any analysis of market processes. From a Coasean perspective, positive transaction costs represent a profit opportunity for entrepreneurs to erode such transaction

This paper proposes a simple framework consisting of a law enforcement model in which criminal organizations (Mafias) can collaborate with each other to control an illegal market. Within this framework, we investigate two different situations: (1) a single monopolistic criminal organization operation or (2) an organization collaborating with another criminal organization. Depending on the quality of

Behavioural law and economics has established a burgeoning research agenda investigating the impact of bias and heuristics on legal decision-making. One of the most important behavioural contributions concerns the impact of framing on choice. The present article expands this line of scholarship by developing a novel hypothesis under which lawyers’ attachment to objectivity and neutrality is assumed

Given the lack of unambiguously constitutional foundations, Spain’s Constitutional Court (TC) has being playing a leading role in building the regulatory framework of the Autonomic State. This paper analyses whether this function is sufficient to explain the level of agreement among TC justices when adopting their resolutions, and in particular, on reaching unanimous rulings. If so, the legalist/federalist