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 Essay extends to the family law area the behavioral economics empirical literature on procrastination. Numerous studies have found that people who have a long-term preference to take welfare actions routinely procrastinate following through (due to a short-term preference for maximizing...

This Article examines the effect of time-inconsistent preferences on the decision-making process of criminal offenders. It shows that even a relatively small preference for immediate gratification and over-optimism about their future self-control can lead hyperbolic criminals to repeatedly...

This article argues that repeated criminal misconduct, at least in some areas, has the characteristics of a habit or addiction. Curiosity or a transient attraction can lead an offender to commit her first crime. This first infraction will give her a sense of how much she enjoyed it, and whether...

This article argues that securities lawyers help reduce transactional complexity in initial public offerings by acting as informational intermediaries. The complexity of IPOs is due to three principal factors. First, IPOs involve large number of parties – managers, accountants, underwriters,...

This article shows that the behavior of perfectly rational financial actors can cause financial meltdowns like the ones that occurred in 2007 and 2008. It analyzes the nature of informational asymmetries and group pathologies common in financial transactions and the role of intermediaries and...

In theory, large institutional investors are in an excellent position to overcome collective action problems and form voting coalitions to actively monitor and discipline managers of public corporations. This article argues that it is highly unlikely that voting coalitions of institutional...

This article develops a behavioral theory of inchoate offenses - criminal attempt, conspiracy, and solicitation. The theory helps explain why inchoate crimes exist and why they are punished less severely than the underlying offense. The article identifies an important aspect of criminal...

This article develops a new theory of interconnected financial contracts. It focuses on a common type of interconnected contracting scenario, in which party A enters into a contract with B, and B enters into a separate contract with C. While A and C are not in privity of contract, their common...