Last year, Senators Barbara Boxer (D-CA) and Bernie Sanders (I-VT) introduced S. 332, the Climate Protection Act of 2013. Based on a “fee-and-dividend” concept, the bill would levy a carbon pollution fee on carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions starting in 2014 at $20 per metric ton of CO2, rising...

In the developed world, antitrust policy has traditionally been a foil to intellectual property (IP). There are now serious concerns that the world's IP system, including both rules created by national legislation and those created by international agreements, is stronger than is the economic...

For over a decade, there has been a spirited academic debate over the impact on crime of laws that grant citizens the presumptive right to carry concealed handguns in public – so-called right-to-carry (RTC) laws. In 2004, the National Research Council (NRC) offered a critical evaluation of the...

Apparent ignorance of more than a century of economic history now threatens the competitive constitution of the Internet under the guise of "net neutrality." Net neutrality is a slogan that stands for the proposition that the Internet and physical means of access to it should be available to all...

A basic principle of law is that damages paid by a liable party should equal the harm caused by that party. However, this principle is not correct when account is taken of litigation costs, because they too are part of the social costs associated with an injury. In this article we examine the...

This paper addresses an important aspect of the interdisciplinary collaboration between law and economics: the use antitrust courts can and should make of empirical industrial organization economics, in light of the expansion of empirical knowledge generated during the last few decades. First we...

What is the optimal system of intellectual property rights to encourage innovation? Empirical evidence from economic history can help to inform important policy questions that have been difficult to answer with modern data: 1) Does the existence of strong patent laws encourage innovation? And 2)...

Whether the firms that supply Internet hardware and software should face restrictions on the use of their property is an important and controversial policy issue. Advocates of “net neutrality” – including President Obama and the current FCC majority – believe that owners of broadband...

The “Resolution Project” began in August 2009, in the midst of the financial crisis, to consider how best to deal with the failure of major financial institutions. The members of the group, assembled from institutions across the country, were Andrew Crockett, Darrell Duffie, Richard Herring,...

This is a survey of some theories of property rights, prepared for the Handbook of Organizational Economics, Princeton University Press, edited by R. Gibbons and J. Roberts. A central feature of property rights is that they influence economic efficiency not (only) directly, but (also) through...