Humanity's problem with climate change has been likened to a "tragedy of the commons". If the atmosphere is seen as an open access dump for gasses like CO2 or methane, Garret Hardin's conclusion from 1968: "Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all" is obviously correct. But how do we create a...

Before the middle of the nineteenth century most laws enacted in the United States were special bills that granted favors to specific individuals, groups, or localities. This fundamentally inegalitarian system provided political elites with important tools that they could use to reward...

We may sharpen our understanding of legislation by juxtaposing it with other types of legal act. John Gardner attempts to differentiate legislation from legal rulings - an unusual juxtaposition in itself - and his claims about the difference are surprising. Legal rulings are legally binding...

We analyze the impact of the Network Enforcement Act, the first regulation which aims at restraining hate speech on large social media platforms. Using a difference-in- differences framework, we measure the causal impact of the German law on the prevalence of hateful content on German Twitter....

In this paper, we propose a new approach to the estimation of social networks and we apply it to the estimation of productivity spillovers in the U.S. Congress. Social networks such as the social connections among lawmakers are not generally directly observed, they can be recovered only using...

The science is clear: the United States and the world must take dramatic action to address climate change or face irreversible, catastrophic planetary harm. Within the U.S.—the world’s largest historic emitter of greenhouse gas emissions—this will require passing new legislation or turning...

We present a three-person, two-period bargaining game with private information. A single proposer is seeking to secure agreement to a proposal under either majority or unanimity rule. Two responders have privately known "breakdown values" which determine their payoff in case of "breakdown"....

I analyze the assignment mechanisms used by the political parties in the US Senate to match their members to legislative committees from a matching theory perspective: one-sided, many-to-many matching with existing tenants. Understanding the data-generating process through detailed analysis of...

Ist der Unionsgesetzgeber an die Grundfreiheiten gebunden? Darf er Maßnahmen, die auf mitgliedstaatlicher Ebene verbotene Beschränkungen der Binnenmarktfreiheiten wären, EU-weit harmonisieren? Und darf er mitgliedstaatliche Maßnahmen mittels Sekundärrecht autorisieren, die ansonsten in...

In division problems with entitlements, we investigate whether fairness concerns overrule strategic behavior and inhibit full use of the decision-making power. In a lab experiment where entitlements are derived from costly contributions, we vary bargaining power by using either the majority rule...

This reply, written for a symposium in (2020) 11 Jurisprudence on Legislated Rights: Securing Human Rights Through Legislation (Cambridge University Press 2018, pb 2019), engages with the careful, constructive, and critical challenges of Timothy Endicott, Dimitris Tsarapatsanis, and Lael Weis....

In this paper, we study the extent to which social connections influence the legislative effectiveness of members of the U.S. Congress. We propose a new model of legislative effectiveness that formalizes the role of social connections and generates simple testable predictions. The model predicts...

While the theoretical literature on non-cooperative legislative bargaining has grown voluminous, there is little empirical work attempting to test a key prediction in this literature: proposal power is valuable. This paper aims to fill this gap in the literature by investigating the role of...

State and federal courts routinely cast state legislatures in the role of democratic hero. In the past year alone, some states have warmed to the nondelegation doctrine, striking down governors’ pandemic responses on the idea that the legislature must make such weighty choices. During the 2020...

Subcommittee oversight hearings provide perhaps the most deeply-rooted and widely-accepted mechanism for congressional involvement in the administrative state, yet surprisingly little is known about the motivations of members of Congress to perform this most basic means of monitoring...

How does opinion polarization over matters of moral conviction affect the legislative outcome of parliamentary institutions? Analysis reveals that in the relatively common case, in which a party's voting power is positively correlated with the public support of the convictions it represents, if...

Safe food is imperative for the modern market. Safe food means that the process which produced a safe and controlled primarily in the context of the plan of analysis and critical and control points that are under constant surveillance in order to process, if necessary, correct it and got a...

Housing rights are conditions granted by statutes or entitlements by law that rest on the understanding of a need for housing and imply certain duties and obligations either taken by the state or other entities and individuals. At the international level, housing rights are embedded in the...

Institutional and political forces create strong inertial pressures that make the updating of legislation a difficult task. As a result, laws and regulations often stagnate, leading to the continued existence of obsolete rules and policies that serve long-forgotten purposes. Recognizing the...

Do institutions constrain presidential power in Africa? Conventional wisdom holds that personalist rule grants African presidents unchecked powers. Consequently, very little research exists on African institutions and their impact on executive authority. In this paper, I use original data on the...

Federal agencies are deeply involved in both the foreground and shadows of legislative drafting. In the foreground, agencies draft the substantive legislation the Administration desires to submit to Congress. In the shadows, agencies provide confidential “technical drafting assistance” on...

Whom should an interest group lobby in a legislature? I develop a model of informational lobbying in which a legislature must decide on the allocation of a local publicly-provided good across districts. An interest group chooses sequentially to search and provide information on districts'...

We consider non-cooperative bargaining on the division of a surplus under simple majority rule. We use the "open rule" bargaining protocol as originally suggested by Baron and Ferejohn (1989): Proposals can be amended before they are voted on. It is widely known that there are significant gaps...

This article surveys the theoretical literature on legislative bargaining with endogenous status-quo. These are the legislative bargaining situations in which in each period a new policy is decided and the policy implemented in the event of no agreement is endogenously determined by the outcome...

This article surveys the theoretical literature on legislative bargaining with endogenous status-quo. These are the legislative bargaining situations in which in each period a new policy is decided and the policy implemented in the event of no agreement is endogenously determined by the outcome...

Das zuletzt gestiegene Interesse des Staats und der Gesellschaft an der Beteiligung von Handwerkskammern in der Entwicklungszusammenarbeit zeigt sich bei der Änderung der Handwerksordnung, in der die Entwicklungszusammenarbeit nun einen eigenen Aufgabenbereich der Kammern darstellt. Die...

Romanian legislation provides for three categories of acts and deeds: corruption offenses, crimes assimilated to corruption offenses and offenses directly related to corruption offenses. According to the Decision of the Supreme Council of National Defense of February 28, 2005, one of the...

Legislative drafting mistakes can upset statutory schemes. The Affordable Care Act was nearly undone by such mistakes. The recent Tax Cuts and Jobs Act is rife with them. Traditional legal scholarship has examined whether courts should help resolve Congress's mistakes. But courts have remained...