Under contingent fees the attorney gets a share of the judgement; under conditional fees they get an upscale premium if the case is won, which is, however, unrelated to the adjudicated amount. We compare conditional and contingent fees in a framework where lawyers choose between a safe and a...

Under contingent fees the attorney gets a share of the judgement; under conditional fees the lawyer gets an upscale premium if the case is won which is, however, unrelated to the adjudicated amount. We compare conditional and contingent fees in a framework where lawyers are uninformed about the...

Increasing penalty structures for repeat offenses are ubiquitous in penal codes, despite little empirical or theoretical support. Multi-period models of criminal enforcement based on the standard economic approach of Becker (1968) generally find that the optimal penalty structure is either flat...

We provide direct estimates of how agents trade off immediate costs and uncertain future benefits that occur in the very long run, 100 or more years away. We exploit a unique feature of housing markets in the U.K. and Singapore, where residential property ownership takes the form of either...

This paper develops a framework for evaluating the social returns to infrastructure investments that intensify product market competition. We use a circular model with asymmetric production costs both for incumbent firms and potential entrants, where unit transport cost measures the intensity of...

This Paper evaluates an Austrian manpower training programme, which is highly innovative in its content and financing - and could therefore serve as a role model for other programmes. In the late 1980s privatization and downsizing of nationalized steel firms have led to large-scale redundancies....