We study a contracting model with unforeseen contingencies in which the court is an active player. Ex-ante, the contracting parties cannot include the risky unforeseen contingencies in the contract they draw up. Ex-post the court observes whether an unforeseen contingency occurred, and decides...

This Paper studies the design of lawmaking and law enforcement institutions based on the premise that law is inherently incomplete. Under incomplete law, law enforcement by courts may suffer from deterrence failure. As a potential remedy, a regulatory regime is introduced. The major functional...

Should arbitrators adjudicate on the basis of their own investigations, or invite the interested parties to make their cases and decide on the basis of the information so gathered? I call the former the inquisitorial procedure in arbitration and the latter the adversarial procedure. I conduct a...

Legal aid expenditure has risen dramatically in recent years, prompting attention from successive governments. A prominent theme of past and present government reform proposals has been the shifting of risk away from the taxpayer towards lawyers, clients and insurers by altering the means by...

The aim of this paper is to show that both location and race matter for explaining the high criminality rate in cities. In our model, blacks and whites are identical in all respects. However, if, for no economic but for extrinsic reasons, everybody (including blacks) believes that blacks are...

We examine a setting in which property rights are initially ambiguously defined. Whether the parties go to court to remove the ambiguity or bargain and settle privately, they incur enforcement costs. When the parties bargain, a version of the Coase theorem holds. Despite the additional costs of...

The purpose of this paper is two-fold. First, it lays forth a rationale for the use of court cases in teaching a sports economics class. Second, it provides an overview of the most important cases related to sports economics. Court classes allow students to develop critical reading and reasoning...

Existing work on the costs of insecure property has largely focused on the overexploitation problem of common pool resources. We investigate other costs of insecure resources - uncertainty costs, the absence of exchange, and enforcement costs - within a simple general equilibrium setting.

El desarrollo económico y social en Colombia está amenazado, entre otros factores, por la "inestabilidad jurídica", agravada ahora por el activismo de la Corte Constitucional durante los años 1994-2000. En este documento se ilustran los efectos económicos mas profundos que habrán de tener...

This paper documents the evolution of the legal independence of the Bank of Israel since its creation in 1954 to present times, provides an international comparison, and assesses the changes in the actual independence of the Bank on a yearly basis following the 1985 stabilization of inflation....