This paper examines the sizes of the fines, damage awards, remediation costs, and market value losses imposed on companies that violate environmental regulations. Firms violating environmental laws suffer statistically significant losses in the market value of firm equity. The losses, however,...

If shareholders own diversified portfolios, and if companies impose externalities on one another, shareholders do not want value maximization to be corporate policy. Instead, shareholders want companies to maximize portfolio values. This occurs when firms internalize between-firm externalities....

Abortion may prevent the birth of "unwanted" children, who would have relatively small investments in human capital and a higher probability of crime. On the other hand, some research suggests that legalizing abortion increases out-of-wedlock births and single parent families, which implies the...

Governments use public education and public ownership of schools and the media to control the information that their citizens receive. More totalitarian governments as well as those with larger wealth transfers make greater investments in publicly controlled information. This finding is borne...

Accusations of political bias in the media are often made by members of both political parties, yet there have been few systematic studies of such bias to date. This paper develops an econometric technique to test for political bias in news reports that controls for the underlying character of...

This paper develops an econometric technique to test for political bias in news reports that controls for the underlying character of the news reported. Because of the changing availability of the number of newspapers in Nexis/Lexis, two sets of time are examined from January 1991 to May 2004...

During the last couple of decades courts have intervened in employment relationships by allowing employees to circumvent the workers' compensation liability restrictions. Recent papers point to firms divesting themselves of operations whose employees handled dangerous substances as firms...