This chapter from the forthcoming Research Handbook on the Economics of Corporate Law (Claire Hill & Brett McDonnell, eds.) provides an overview of the economic theory and evidence regarding public company executive compensation. It is intended to provide the reader with an entryway into the...

The federal income tax code has become increasingly complex over time with the implication that many taxpayers no longer understand the connection between their life decisions and their taxes. Some commentators have suggested that increasing computational complexity may be attributable in part...

Prevailing accounts of the efficiency of subsidies for the nonprofit sector presume that the only alternative source of public goods is a single sovereign, controlled by a single median voter. Tiebout sorting, however, also provides citizens with alternative bundles of public goods. When these...

Many forms of consumption tax, including recent proposals to impose a tax on the use of carbon, impose disproportionate burdens on the poor. Commentators who propose mitigating this impact with tax rebates for low-income families have overlooked the importance of the timing of consumption for...

This Article critiques the prevailing justification for subsidies for the charitable sector, and suggests a new alternative. According to contemporary accounts, charity corrects the failure of the private market to provide public goods, and further corrects the failure of government to provide...

This draft offers a critical review of the economic literature on the efficiency of low-salience taxes. In particular, I explore the possibility that hidden taxes may in fact be more efficient than others. Since the entire field comprises only a handful of papers, the review is devoted mostly to...

Timing is an important consideration in regulatory design. Corrective taxes are usually imposed before or contemporaneously with the harmful activity they are aimed at preventing, while tort awards are assessed ex post, in its aftermath. Patents and research grants both can encourage innovation,...

Do stakeholder suits against managers reduce agency costs? I examine this question using a large panel of private foundation tax returns, together with hand-collected data on state-law variations in the right of donors to sue wayward nonprofit managers. In both difference-in-differences and...

This Essay, prepared as a contribution to the 2009 NYU Annual Survey of American Law Symposium on Preemption and Tort Law, takes issue with the standard position in the law and economics literature that substantive consumer-protection rules should not be used to redistribute wealth. Models of...