Young adults ages 18-29 have the lowest insurance rate of any age group in the United States. Part of the reason for this is that many young adults underestimate their risk of facing high medical costs - the risk is low, but not as low as these “young invincibles” believe. To address this,...

Courts frequently say that wilfulness matters when awarding damages for breach of contract. Such thinking is, however, at odds with the basic expectation damages principle: if we are trying to put the injured promisee in the position she would have been in but-for the breach, the promisor's...

James Heckman was the 2000 Nobel Laureate in Economics. This short paper reviews the methodological and substantive contributions Heckman has made to the empirical study of law. Heckman's work is shown to be important because he has developed techniques to address fundamental problems such as...

A substantial fraction of insurance bought by consumers and small businesses is sold through insurance agents rather than purchased directly from firms. Insurance agents can serve valuable “market-making” functions by providing information to both sides of a transaction; and they can offer...

Because choosing insurance requires consumers to assess risks and probabilities, the demand for insurance has proven to be fertile ground for identifying deviations from rational behavior. Consumers often shun the insurance against large losses that they rationally should want (e.g., floods);...