The rough coincidence of the 50th anniversary of Milton Friedman’s Sunday New York times Magazine article – “the Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase Profit” – and a movement advocating that corporations should have a broader purpose than maximizing shareholder value...

Mergers involving nascent competition are a hot topic in antitrust circles, especially in light of the pending FTC case against Facebook; but the thinking about the topic is nascent, too. This paper is intended to contribute to that thinking and to discuss a variety of questions that have not...

New technologies continue to democratize, decentralize, and disrupt production, offering the possibility that scarcity will be a thing of the past for many industries. We call these technologies of abundance. But our economy and our legal institutions are based on scarcity. Abundance lowers...

SPACs have been widely criticized for imposing high costs on SPAC shareholders and for the incentive they create for sponsors to enter into mergers that are bad deals. Some SPACs adopt sponsor earnouts, which reduce a sponsor’s compensation unless specified post-merger share price targets are...

The prison time actually served by a convicted criminal depends to a significant degree on decisions made by the state during the course of imprisonment — on whether to grant parole or other forms of sentence reduction. In this article we study a model of the adjustment of sentences assuming...

We address an important issue the Supreme Court left unaddressed this spring in its blockbuster Google v. Oracle decision: are computer interfaces copyrightable at all? We argue that they aren’t, and that the Federal Circuit's decision to the contrary is an aberration that should not undermine...

Economists and legal scholars have debated the reasons people adopt open source software, and accordingly whether and to what extent the open source model can scale, replacing proprietary rights as a primary means of production. In this study, we use the release by a biotechnology company of...

Repeat patent plaintiffs - those who sue eight or more times on the same patents - have a disproportionate effect on the patent system. They are responsible for a sizeable fraction of all patent lawsuits. Their patents should be among the strongest, according to all economic measures of patent...