We study the predictive power of approximately 2.5 million stock picks submitted by individual users to the “CAPS†website run by the Motley Fool company (www.caps.fool.com). These picks prove to be surprisingly informative about future stock prices. Indeed, a strategy of shorting...

We analyze the informational content of more than 1.2 million stock picks provided by more than 60,000 individuals from November 1, 2006 to October 31, 2007 on the CAPS open access website created by the Motley Fool company (www.caps.fool.com). On average, an individual pick in CAPS outperformed...

In September 1998, the Judicial Conference of the United States abandoned its latest attempt to regulate the timing of interviews and offers in the law clerk selection process. This paper surveys the further unraveling of the market since then, makes comparisons with other entry level...

Catastrophic risks differ in terms of their natural or human origins, their possible amplification by human behaviors, and the relationships between those who create the risks and those who suffer the losses. Given their disparate anatomies, catastrophic risks generally require tailored...

This analysis argues that blame for the financial crisis falls specifically and heavily on a broad range of the private players and public regulators in our financial sector. Wall Street and the government joined hands in a situation of contributory negligence. Even recognizing the triggering...

For several decades now a debate has raged about policy-making by litigation. Spurred by the way in which tobacco, environmental, and other litigation has functioned as an alternative form of regulation, the debate asks whether policy-making or regulation by litigation is more or less socially...

Why is private investment so low in Gulf compared to Western countries? We investigate cross-regional differences in trust and reference points for trustworthiness as possible factors. Experiments controlling for cross-regional differences in institutions and beliefs about trustworthiness reveal...

In a world of imperfect information, reputations often guide the sequential decisions to trust and to reward trust. We consider two-player situations, where one player – the truster – decides whether to trust, and the other player – the temptee – has a temptation to...

Data on 2,355 married women from the 2006 China Health and Nutrition Survey are used to study how female employment affects fertility in China. China has deep concerns with both population size and female employment, so the relationship between the two should be better understood. Causality...

The BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill highlighted the glaring weakness in the current liability and regulatory regime for oil spills and for environmental catastrophes more broadly. This article proposes a new liability structure for deep sea oil drilling and for catastrophic risks generally. It...