A government's most important contingent liabilities are usually the liabilities of banks, subnational governments, state-owned enterprises, and other entities that benefit from explicit or implicit government guarantees. Data on these liabilities can be used to track the gross amount of the...

This paper reviews the Digital Services Act (DSA), a package of new rules for platforms proposed by the European Commission late last year. The paper takes stock of current and future situations for rules on content moderation and takedowns, and discusses how the DSA addresses the balance...

Public authorities in many jurisdictions are concerned about the proliferation of illegal content and products on online platforms. In this paper, we provide an economic appraisal of platform liability that highlights the effects of a stricter liability rule on several key variables such as...

Does enhanced shareholder liability reduce bank failure? We compare the performance of around 4,200 state-regulated banks of similar size in neighboring U.S. states with different liability regimes during the Great Depression. The distress rate of limited liability banks was 29% higher than that...

Purpose - This study investigates the impact of board independence on firm risk of Vietnamese listed firms and the moderating effect of capital expenditure on this relationship. Design/methodology/approach - This paper applies fixed effects and dynamic generalized method of moments (GMM) models...

Law is for humans. Humans suffer from cognitive limitations. Legal institutions can help humans by making these limitations irrelevant. This experiment shows that strong property rights serve this function. In theory, efficient outcomes obtain even without strong property rights. In a...

This paper studies the differential effects of fines and damages on people's investment in accident prevention. We report results from a laboratory experiment in which monetary payoffs are maintained across the two policy instruments. While standard theory predicts no difference in behavior, we...

Certification organisations have become important players in the monitoring of compliance by operators, in particular, from developing countries with social and environmental standards. At the same time, some of the worst disasters in recent years, such as the Ali Enterprises factory fire in...

We investigate how state Universal Demand statutes (UD) that lower director liability in derivative lawsuits affect recruitment and retention of outside directors. Using a difference-in-differences analysis, we document improvements in outside director experience following UD adoptions,...

This Article explores the divergence in law and convergence in economics in dealing with harms and benefits. While tort law usually makes the injurer internalize wrongful harms through damages, restitution law does not enable the benefactor to internalize the benefits she confers on others...

This study focuses on U.S. shareholder derivative cases in which Audit Committee members were defendants. Three grounds for Audit Committee liability were alleged in those cases: (1) violation of the Fiduciary Duties of Care, Loyalty or Good Faith, which may include failure to provide proper...

This paper studies the differential effects of fines and damages on people's investment in accident prevention. We report results from a laboratory experiment in which monetary payoffs are maintained across the two policy instruments. While standard theory predicts no difference in behavior, we...

Law is for humans. Humans suffer from cognitive limitations. Legal institutions can help humans by making these limitations irrelevant. This experiment shows that strong property rights serve this function. In theory, efficient outcomes obtain even without strong property rights. In a...

This chapter discusses distress-triggered liabilities: contingent obligations of a corporate debtor that are likely to be triggered by the debtor's own financial distress. Three common examples of such liabilities are loan default penalties, loan prepayment fees such as make-whole premiums, and...

The literature contains ambiguous findings as to whether statistical discrimination, e.g. in the form of racial profiling, causes a reduction in deterrence. These analyses, however, assume that enforcers' incentives are exogenously fixed. This article demonstrates that when the costs and...

This paper investigates optimal contracts between risk-neutral parties when both exert efforts and the agent faces limited liability. It is shown that a simple share-or-nothing with bonus contract (SonBo for short) is optimal and implements the second-best outcome, i.e., the best possible...

As hope of a quick end to the COVID-19 pandemic fades, both policymakers and analysts are shifting focus to restarting the economy. As of late April, more than 26 million Americans had filed for unemployment. Estimates of the cost of every month of partial shutdown are as high as $1.07 trillion...

The majority of audit litigation research has focused on juror judgments. We examine how jurors' negligence judgments and attorneys' out-of-court settlements are differently impacted by two features of a materially misstated accounting estimate — the amount of estimate uncertainty and whether...

In Leegin, the SCOTUS overturned its previous decision in Dr. Miles by holding that minimum resale price maintenance (“RPM”) between a manufacturer and its downstream dealers/retailers now must be analyzed under the rule-of-reason standard under federal antitrust law. This article discusses...

Recent advances in decentralized, autonomous technology enables replacement of human agents with technology agents that perform recurring transactions with little human intervention. Theory suggests that this shift from human to technology agency will change perceptions of causality which could...

On January 30, 2020, the World Health Organisation declared the new coronavirus (2019-nCoV) outbreak a Public Health Emergency of International Concern. Alongside quarantines, travel restrictions and bans, businesses have been confronted with limited access to global human capital and unreliable...

This article examines the claim that assessment of the standard of care in the law of negligence utilises and must utilise considerations of utility. It argues that this position is mistaken. It also maintains that cases frequently thought to support this view do not do so. The article also...

This article presents a forensic accounting theory. Forensic accounting theory is an explanation of why and how the choice of methods and techniques used to detect creative accounting or fraudulent manipulations in financial reporting, and the outcome of using such methods or techniques, depends...

Despite a longstanding debate over the pros and cons of imposing legal liability on directors and officers (D&Os), how D&O liability affects corporate innovation is rarely studied. We study this question by exploiting Nevada's 2001 corporate law change that dramatically lowered D&O legal...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to elucidate the concept of ḍamān al-milkiyyah (ownership risk) and to assess its application in contemporary Islamic financial products and services. Design/methodology/approach The methodology adopted is that of descriptive research. Findings From an...

Introduction : understanding offshore construction -- Tendering and negotiating contracts -- Design risk -- Scope of work and interpretation of contracts -- Subcontracting -- Changes to the work -- Defects -- Delay -- Intellectual property rights -- Acceptance and delivery -- Indemnity and...

Das Thema Nachhaltigkeit ist längst auf den Finanzmärkten angekommen. Im Zuge dessen haben sich Nachhaltigkeitsratingagenturen etabliert, die in Form von Ratings und Indizes bewerten, wie nachhaltig Finanzinstrumente und Unternehmen sind. Ihre Tätigkeit wirft juristische Fragestellungen auf:...