In an era characterized by inequalities of income and influence, political polarization, and the segregation of social spaces, the income tax deduction for charitable contributions would appear to abet some of our worst social ills because it allows wealthy individuals to steer public funds to...

This article reveals the positions of corporations not only as active players in politics but also as targets of activist shareholders with opposing political preferences. We examine whether a firm's political orientation, as measured by its political spending, serves as a driver of shareholder...

Both the Great Depression and the Great Recession followed systemic banking crises and preceded unusually weak and slow recoveries. The prior literature has identified monetary, household demand, and credit effects as contributors to the severe and prolonged downturns. This paper studies a...

We argue that the high revenue triggers in proposed digital taxes — including the recent Franco-German proposal for a digital advertising tax — may violate state-aid law and prohibitions on nationality discrimination in the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union.We explain how both...

The Deutsche Bahn doctrine holds that EU actions, as opposed to Member State actions, are immune from state-aid scrutiny. This interpretation has a textualist grounding: Because the EU Treaty bans only “aid granted by a Member State,” it does not constrain aid granted by the EU itself. This...

One of the signature rulemaking initiatives of the Obama administration was the Fiduciary Rule, which redefined the relationship between retirement investors and their brokers by imposing broad fiduciary obligations on financial professionals who had previously escaped classification as...

The IRS has an uneasy relationship with tax return preparers. Preparers may ease the tax filing process and improve take-up of benefits like the earned income tax credit (EITC); however, preparers also profit from financial products sold in connection with tax preparation that have been viewed...

This article, written for a symposium on Bond v. United States, connects the law and economics of contract interpretation to the Supreme Court’s modern practice of creating statutory interpretive presumptions. The paper compares information-forcing defaults, both majoritarian and penal, to...

This paper explicates the four building blocks underlying emission standard guidelines in the U.S. EPA's proposed clean power plan for reducing carbon dioxide emissions from the U.S. electric power sector. It critically analyzes the methodology by which EPA has assessed the cost and...

The system of residential mortgage contact regulation enacted by the 2010 Dodd Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010 has been justified as necessary to prevent lenders from exploiting consumer misperception and impatience through the sale of complex mortgage contracts with...