The American founders attempted to establish a clockwork government. Virtue was to be assured by humans, acting as they must within their human natures, but operating within a framework that assured mechanically that the outputs of government would not be tyrannical. Whether this system has...

In this article, I suggest some new explanations for the ancient rule of equal sharing in partnership law. The equal sharing rule is rooted in the structure of basic bargaining problems. Studying the structure of basic bargaining problems reveals that the equal sharing rule is efficient, in the...

This paper argues that a hypothetical contract analysis of fiduciary duty requires a corporate law norm that the total value of financial claims against the firm be maximized. This conclusion follows from using rational investors complying with the CAPM mandate as the parties making the...

In 1987, an intriguing legal memorandum arrived over the transom at the White House. Sent by New York City securities lawyer Stephen Glazier, it argued that President Reagan did not need a statute or constitutional amendment to exercise a line-item veto because the Constitution inherently...

This study examines determinants of cohesion in the Supreme Court's reliance on precedent in the network of U.S. Supreme Court precedents. We use a database of all Supreme Court Citations and test several measures of annualized Court action as independent variables in a regression on several...

Regulation FD, imposed by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in October 2000, was designed to create a level playing field by prohibiting selective disclosure of material private information to particular groups. Exactly what advantage these groups gain is unclear. If multiple insiders...

Evidence of dividend yield return predictability has been presented so widely and consistently that the result has tended to be generally accepted. This paper shows that return predictability of the dividend yield is a spurious result that is due to dividend persistence and finds that standard...

Evidence of dividend yield return predictability has been presented so widely and consistently that the result has tended to be generally accepted. This paper shows that return predictability of the dividend yield is a spurious result that is due to dividend persistence and finds that standard...

Regulation FD, imposed by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in October 2000, was designed to create a level playing field by prohibiting selective disclosure of material private information to particular groups. Exactly what advantage these groups gain is unclear. If multiple insiders...

Empirical research on firms’ (dis)incentives to disclose investigates the effects of a range of variables including information asymmetry, agency costs, political costs, and proprietary costs. Verrecchia (2001) argues that economic-based models of disclosure must establish a link between...