In 1982, the US Congress established the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) as the sole appellate court for patent cases. Ostensibly, this court was created to eliminate inconsistencies in the application and interpretation of patent law across federal courts, and thereby mitigate...

We study when firms choose to install boards and their roles in a historical setting where neither boards nor their duties are mandated by law. Boards arise in firms with large, heterogenous shareholder bases. We propose that an important role of boards is to mediate between heterogenous...

For a large sample of U.S. companies, we compare the cost of equity estimates of a two-factor international CAPM with those of the single-factor domestic CAPM and the single-factor global CAPM. Our purpose is to assess how much difference it makes for U.S. firms to use the two-factor ICAPM...

This paper proposes a test of racial bias in capital sentencing based upon patterns of judicial errors in lower courts. We model the behavior of the trial court as minimizing a weighted sum of the probability of sentencing an innocent and that of letting a guilty defendant free. We define racial...

The "monetary method" to measure the size of the shadow economy is based on econometric estimates of the demand for currency. These estimates are used to reckon the currency held by economic agents in excess of the amount they need to finance registered transactions. This excess of currency...

Defining disability, from youth to old age, is a lesson in legislative priorities and incentive systems that are below the radar screen. This poster presentation provides a visual illustration of the life cycle of the concept of disability, over an average life span. The time line begins when a...

This paper studies the relationship between permanent income and homicides, estimating an income-crime elasticity. We assume that this elasticity varies across geographical areas. We estimate different specifications of Spatial Panel Models using information of urban areas in Medellin...

This paper investigates the effect of delinquency in youth on subsequent educational attainment. To do so, we focus on delinquent acts committed by age 16 and examine their impact on two measures of educational attainment: high school graduation and college graduation. Using information on males...

This paper argues that terrorism, beyond its immediate impact on innocent victims, also raises the costs of crime, and therefore, imposes a negative externality on potential criminals. Terrorism raises the costs of crime through two channels: (i) by increasing the presence and activity of the...

We use retail scanner data on purchases of high calorie food to study the link between recreational marijuana laws (RMLs) and consumption of high calorie food. To do this we exploit differences in the timing of introduction of marijuana laws among states and find that they are complements....