Shawn Bayern recently argued that it is possible in certain U.S. states to give de facto legal personhood to an autonomous system (i.e., a computer system that is capable of operating a legal entity without human intervention) using a permanently memberless limited liability company (LLC) that...

The pros and cons of stricter disclosure rules for parliamentarians are hotly debated. Some argue that disclosure rules for parliamentarians increase transparency of the legislative branch, leading to lower levels of rent-seeking and corruption, increased citizen trust in parliament, and better...

This paper develops a model of a monopolistically competitive industry with extensive and intensive business investment and shows how these margins respond to changes in average and marginal corporate tax rates. Intensive investment refers to the size of a firm's capital stock. Extensive...

The private provision of public goods suffers from two potential types of efficiency failures: non-optimal output levels of the public good (quantity problem) and an inefficient mix of contributors and non-contributors (sorting problem). Embedding the provision game into a contest that rewards...

As part of the Doha Development Agenda many members of the World Trade Organization (WTO) and in particular its Director-General have actively promoted the so-called Aid-for-Trade initiative. Rather than offer a comprehensive account of this initiative, the purpose here is to consider its...

There seems to be a virtual consensus among corporate law scholars that state legislatures should enable corporations to select governance terms from a menu of predefined statutory rules. In this Article, I challenge this view. The private sector has produced menus of contract terms, such as...

In 2007, the Wall Street Journal published an article claiming that each execution saves more than 70 lives. This example is used to show how easy it is, using simple or advanced econo-metric techniques, to produce results that do or do not support the deterrence hypothesis. Moreover, we also...

The paper axiomatizes a freedom measure based on the idea that an agent is free if she can causally influence relevant aspects of her life. To model this, causal networks are employed. It is shown that the measure is a generalization of several opportunity set based measures. The measure solves...

This paper asks whether rating agencies played a passive role or were an active driving force during Europe's sovereign debt crisis. We address this by estimating relationships between sovereign debt ratings and macroeconomic and structural variables. We then use these equ-ations to decompose...

Economic analysis plays a major role in the American legal discourse, while its position in the German-speaking legal debate remains comparatively limited. In Germany and Austria, a widespread aversion against law and economics can be observed among legal scholars. This article advances an...