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on Law and Economics |
| By: | Porzecanski, Arturo C. |
| Abstract: | Post-War conceptions of human rights have evolved independently of long-established theory and practice of property and creditor rights, to the detriment of the development and implementation of human rights law. This chapter attempts to build a first bridge between these two fields of law. It begins by recalling the strikingly different origin and implementation of ‘human’ versus property and creditor rights, because the differences have significant implications. Human rights laws are more honoured in the breach than in the observance in most parts of the world, principally because states accepted international standards governing the treatment of their own nationals in their own territory while reserving to themselves the sovereign right to enforce those rights as they saw fit. In sharp contrast, when it comes to property and creditor rights, there are few gaps between principled intentions, legal mandates, and actual enforcement. Property and creditor rights are important for the attainment of other human rights, especially those of an economic nature, and many human rights are connected to, and are rather inseparable from, broadly conceived property rights. There follows a discussion of the still wide gap between aspirational human rights and economic reality. The time has come for human rights scholars to ratchet down their expectations to match the very limited capacity of low-income and formerly communist countries most prone to human rights deficiencies to import the Western European welfare state model. The final section focuses on the poorly understood interconnections between sovereign debts and human rights. Neglect of property and creditor-rights considerations has led many contemporary human rights advocates down an infertile, if not inappropriate, intellectual and policy path. Speculation that contracts governing cross-border debts and investments may not be sufficiently compelling, at least relative to human rights commitments, is unwarranted and counterproductive. |
| Keywords: | Human rights; property rights; creditor rights; sovereign debt; HIPC |
| JEL: | F3 F34 F35 H63 K11 K12 K33 K39 |
| Date: | 2017–05–01 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:79123&r=law |
| By: | Ellul, Andrew; Pagano, Marco |
| Abstract: | Corporate leverage responds differently to employees' legal protection in bankruptcy depending on whether leverage is chosen to curtail workers' bargaining power or is driven by credit constraints. Using newly collected cross-country data on employees' rights in corporate bankruptcy, we estimate the impact of such rights on firms' capital structure, applying triple-diff strategies that exploit time-series, cross-country and firm-level variation. The estimates show that leverage increases more substantially in response to rises in corporate property values or in profitability at firms where employees have strong seniority in liquidation and weak rights in restructuring, consistently with the strategic use of leverage. |
| Keywords: | bankruptcy; leverage; seniority; wage bargaining; workers’ rights |
| JEL: | G31 G32 G38 H25 H26 M40 |
| Date: | 2017–05 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:12033&r=law |
| By: | Christoph Engel (Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods) |
| Abstract: | To their credit, empirical legal scholars try to live up to the highest methodological standards from the social sciences. But these standards do not always match the legal research question. This paper focuses on normative legal argument based on empirical evidence. Whether there is a normative problem, and whether legal intervention promises to mitigate the problem, requires a decision. If uncertainty cannot be completely removed, the legal decision-maker must weigh the risk of false positives against the risk of false negatives. This may call for an adjustment of the significance level. The fact that all legal choice is historically contingent, that legal problems tend to be ill-defined, and that strategic actors have an incentive to bias the generation of evidence defy frequentist statistics. Yet the law can capitalize on the adversarial principle. Competition among interested parties helps contain the strategic element and spurs the creative search for better evidence. This leads to suggestive, but institutionally contained empirical evidence. |
| Keywords: | normative claims, frequentist statistics, significance, power, structural equation model, finite mixture, Bayesian statistics, prediction, machine learning |
| JEL: | A12 C01 C11 C12 C18 C81 H41 K00 K41 |
| Date: | 2017–04 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:mpg:wpaper:2017_07&r=law |
| By: | Pieter Desmet (TU Delf); Christoph Engel (Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods) |
| Abstract: | Experimental participants are more likely to follow an arbitrary rule the more of their peers do so as well. The difference between unconditional and conditional rule following is most pro-nounced for individuals who follow few rules unconditionally. |
| Keywords: | conditional rule following, deontological motives, conditional cooperation, experiment |
| JEL: | A13 C91 D03 D63 K42 |
| Date: | 2017–05 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:mpg:wpaper:2017_09&r=law |
| By: | Masatoshi Kato (School of Economics, Kwansei Gakuin University); Koichiro Onishi (Faculty of Intellectual Property, Osaka Institute of Technology); Yuji Honjo (Faculty of Commerce, Chuo University) |
| Abstract: | This study examines the role of patenting activities in new-firm survival, using a data set of firms founded from 2003 to 2010 in the Japanese manufacturing and software sectors. In particular, we distinguish the effects of patenting activities of chief executive officers (CEOs) from those of patenting activities of firms, taking into account exit routes: bankruptcy, voluntary liquidation, and merger. It is found that firms that engaged in patenting activities after start-up are less likely to go bankrupt. It is also found that firms whose CEOs have experience in patenting activities before start-up are less likely to go bankrupt. In contrast, we provide evidence that CEOs' involvement in patenting activities after start-up are not helpful for survival. Furthermore, the results based on subsamples according to firm age show that while firms' patenting activities do not increase the probability of survival in the early years since start-up, they help new firms surviving after a certain period of time since start-up. While CEOs' pre-entry patenting activities have a significant explanatory power in reducing the probability of bankruptcy within a certain period of time since start-up, they have no longer significant effect afterwards. Further, CEOs' patenting activities after start-up increase the probability of exit through bankruptcy and voluntary liquidation especially after a certain period of time since start-up. |
| Keywords: | New firm, patenting, chief executive officer, survival, firm age |
| Date: | 2017–05 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:kgu:wpaper:159&r=law |
| By: | Ioana Popovici; Johanna Catherine Maclean; Michael T. French |
| Abstract: | Each year, 10,000 individuals die in alcohol-impaired traffic accidents in the United States, while psychoactive drugs are involved in 20% of all fatal traffic accidents. We investigate whether state parity laws for substance use disorder (SUD) treatment have the unintended benefit of reducing fatal traffic accidents. Parity laws compel insurers to cover SUD treatment in private insurance markets, thereby reducing the financial costs of and increasing access to treatment for beneficiaries. We employ over 20 years of administrative data from the national Fatal Accident Reporting System coupled with a differences-in-differences research design to investigate the potential spillover effects of parity laws to traffic safety. Our findings indicate that passage of a state parity law reduces fatal traffic accident rates by 4.1 to 5.4%. These findings suggest that government regulations requiring insurers to cover SUD treatment can significantly improve traffic safety, possibly by reducing the number of impaired drivers on roadways. |
| JEL: | I1 I13 I18 |
| Date: | 2017–05 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:23388&r=law |
| By: | Congedo, Pierluigi |
| Abstract: | The paper tackles the discussion about vertical separation in the electronic communications sector, in its two main forms functional and structural. The author will argue how mandatory structural separation under certain conditions could be a possible option. The evidence is provided by the analysis of recent commitment decisions adopted by the European Commission in the energy sector, and by structural separation undertakings signed in Australia and New Zealand in the past few years. The paper considers the theoretical background, such as the various forms of separation identified by the OECD in 2001 and 2011, but also the current discussion around the Second Telecoms Review (2005-2015) in the United Kingdom. |
| Keywords: | vertical structural separation, functional separation, regulation, abuse, dominance, essential facilities, commitments, electronic communications |
| JEL: | K21 K23 L1 L12 L4 L43 L44 L9 L95 L96 |
| Date: | 2015–12–30 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:69619&r=law |
| By: | Kiesewetter, Dirk; Manthey, Johannes |
| Abstract: | This paper analyses the relationship between corporate governance and tax avoidance. We use a regression discontinuity design (RDD) in a two-stage instrumental variable and take advantage of the exogenous variation in the index membership around the DAX and MDAX threshold. We suppose the differences in corporate governance result from the valueweighted composition of the market capitalization-based indexes. We find a significant discontinuity in the level of the corporate governance characteristics at the cutoff. The largest MDAX firms show stronger corporate governance characteristics compared to the smallest DAX firms. Our analysis shows that strong corporate governance characteristics drive down the effective tax rate for the DAX firms. This paper contributes to existing research by establishing a causal relationship between governance and taxes. This research aims to highlight the wide-ranging effects of institutional investors, which channel in corporate policy, in our case tax management. |
| Keywords: | Tax Avoidance,Corporate Governance,RDD,Regression Discontinuity Design |
| JEL: | H20 H25 H26 M41 M48 |
| Date: | 2017 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:arqudp:218&r=law |
| By: | Andrew B. Ayres; Eric C. Edwards; Gary D. Libecap |
| Abstract: | Collective action to remedy the losses of open access to common-pool resources often is late and incomplete, extending rent dissipation. Examples include persistent over-exploitation of oil fields and ocean fisheries, despite general agreement that production constraints are needed. Transaction costs encountered in assigning property rights are an explanation, but analysis of their role is limited by a lack of systematic data. We examine governance institutions in California’s 445 groundwater basins using a new dataset to identify factors that influence the adoption of extraction controls. In 309 basins, institutions allow unconstrained pumping, while an additional 105 basins have weak management plans. Twenty of these basins are severely overdrafted. Meanwhile, users in 31 basins have defined groundwater property rights, the most complete solution. We document the critical role of transaction costs in explaining this variation in responses. This research adds to the literatures on open access, transaction costs, bargaining, and property rights |
| JEL: | K11 N52 P48 Q15 Q25 Q58 |
| Date: | 2017–05 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:23382&r=law |
| By: | ITF |
| Abstract: | App-based for-hire transport services make mobility more efficient by better matching supply and demand. They offer passengers a high degree of predictability and ease of use, and drivers with highly flexible work opportunities. Yet the popularity of app-based services has eroded the market share of traditional taxi operators, causing significant friction that is manifesting itself in court cases and even physical violence. How to regulate these new services is therefore high on the agenda of governments around the world. This study, commissioned by the Portuguese Institute for Mobility and Transport, reviews legislation and regulatory frameworks for taxi and for-hire transport services in Portugal and six other countries in order to foster an evidence-based discussion of the issue. This report is part of the International Transport Forum’s Case-Specific Policy Analysis series. These are topical studies on specific issues carried out by the ITF in agreement with local institutions. |
| Date: | 2016–06–09 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:oec:itfaac:24-en&r=law |
| By: | Genakos, Christos D.; Valletti, Tommaso; Verboven, Frank |
| Abstract: | We study the dual relationship between market structure and prices and between market structure and investment in mobile telecommunications. Using a uniquely constructed panel of mobile operators' prices and accounting information across 33 OECD countries between 2002 and 2014, we document that more concentrated markets lead to higher end user prices. Furthermore, they also lead to higher investment per mobile operator, though the impact on total investment is not conclusive. Our findings are not only relevant for the current consolidation wave in the telecommunications industry. More generally, they stress that competition and regulatory authorities should take seriously the potential trade-off between market power effects and efficiency gains stemming from agreements between firms. |
| Keywords: | Investments; market structure; mergers; Mobile telecommunications; prices |
| JEL: | K20 L10 L40 L96 |
| Date: | 2017–05 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:12054&r=law |
| By: | Miller, Alan |
| Abstract: | I introduce a model of corporate voting. I characterize the shareholder majority rule as the unique corporate voting rule that satisfies four axioms: anonymity, neutrality, share monotonicity, and merger, a property that requires consistency in election outcomes following stock-for-stock mergers. |
| Keywords: | Corporate voting, axioms, shareholder majority rule, quotas rules, merger, one share-one vote |
| JEL: | D71 D72 K22 |
| Date: | 2017–05–17 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:79185&r=law |