International Review of Law and Economics最新文献

This study compares the efficiency of the strict liability and negligence rules in the case of a data breach. Contrary to standard results, we demonstrate that the strict liability rule cannot induce the efficient activity and care levels of a data controller. This is mainly due to possible positive externalities from data breaches, unlike in usual tort cases. We show that the negligence rule is more efficient than the strict liability rule if the positive externality is sufficiently large. The main insight is carried over to the case where a data controller uses a data processor to process personal information before selling it in the market. If hackers are explicitly introduced into the model, the care level of the data controller increases with the hacking activity, whereas the latter level decreases with the former. In this model, if the hacker’s gain is sufficiently small, the negligence rule can be made more efficient by adjusting due care to a harsher level than the equilibrium care level under strict liability to reduce hacking activity, although a pure strategy equilibrium may not exist for some due care levels.

This article examines the relationship between carbon disclosure, equity returns, and investor awareness in the Chinese A-share market. The study uses firm-disclosed and proprietary vendor-estimated carbon emissions data for A-share listed companies and investigates whether the presentation of carbon risks affects the cross-sectional equity returns of Chinese domestically listed firms. The results indicate that main-board listed companies with higher unscaled carbon emissions tend to earn higher equity returns, even after controlling for factors such as size, book-to-market ratio, momentum, and firm characteristics. Moreover, the observed carbon risk premium associated with carbon-emitting companies decreases as investor awareness improves following the launch of policy agendas promoting carbon neutrality in China. These findings support the research hypothesis that investors seek higher returns for equity investments in carbon-emission-intensive companies to compensate for the higher carbon risks associated with such firms. The study also highlights the importance of carbon disclosure, as companies generally disclose their ESG information when they have improved performance in reducing their carbon emissions.

This paper studies the role of environmental liability in shaping firms’ product differentiation choices, both horizontally (product design) and vertically (safety), and the ensuing welfare implications. We use a spatial Cournot duopoly where firms’ activity may entail accidental environmental harm. We show that for low levels of harm, both strict liability and negligence lead to a fully symmetric equilibrium with no differentiation: strict liability provides less output and more safety (thus, lower expected environmental harm) than negligence. Nevertheless, negligence affords higher welfare. For higher environmental harm, only strict liability yields an equilibrium where firms differentiate both horizontally and vertically: each firm becomes dominant (dominated) on a subset of local markets, where it delivers more (less) output and much more (less) safety than in the no-differentiation equilibrium under negligence. In this case, strict liability provides higher welfare.

This paper analyses the technical efficiency of first-instance courts and investigates the existence of scale and scope economies. To assess the technical efficiency of specialized and non-specialized court benches, we use Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA). This study uses data from 2015 to 2021, encompassing every bench within the Portuguese first-instance courts, totalling 3249 observations.

Our findings reveal diseconomies of scale, with more than half of the benches experiencing increasing returns to scale, indicating that their performance would benefit from increased scale. The scale diseconomies varied by bench type: benches primarily handling civil cases and generic benches faced mostly increasing returns to scale. In contrast, those dealing predominantly with criminal cases experienced decreasing returns to scale.

Additionally, we observe diseconomies of scope, indicating that generic and non-specialized benches were less efficient than specialized ones. Overall, this paper provides empirical evidence supporting the notion that the specialization of benches enhances their efficiency.

This paper examines how governments can optimally audit to discourage tax avoidance. We assume that an accounting firm designs and promotes strategies for tax avoidance. This firm adapts the quality and diversity of these strategies in response to shifts in government policies. We investigate when it is more effective to approve some methods while cracking down on others, rather than targeting all tax-avoidance activities uniformly. We find that selectively enforcing against specific methods can be optimal. This approach not only reduces the quality but also limits the variety of tax avoidance activities in the market and positively impacts the government’s tax revenue collection. Our analysis provides practical insights, linking the costs of auditing with the interaction between enforcement, the quality of tax avoidance methods, and tax revenue outcomes.

Strategic climate change litigation is a rising phenomenon that has attracted considerable academic interest. Still, limited understanding exists of the effects of strategic litigation cases outside the courtroom – more specifically, on whether strategic litigation can influence public attitudes on climate change policy. Based on the concept of legal cueing, we conduct a pre-registered vignette experiment with a quota-representative sample of UK citizens to study the impact of information on strategic climate change litigation on stated and revealed preferences for climate policy measures. We furthermore perform an exploratory analysis of participants’ demographic characteristics and their expressed sentiment towards a carbon tax. Overall, the experiment returns null results, suggesting no direct link between strategic climate litigation and policy attitudes in our experimental setup. We discuss how legal cues may affect attitudes in a more indirect and cumulative manner.

This paper econometrically tests the possible existence of a War of Courts when the Spanish Constitutional Court (CC) decides on constitutional complaints (recursos de amparo), filed by citizens against the violation of a fundamental right or freedom by the Supreme Court. Exploiting a unique database comprising 404 amparo appeals rulings issued by the Spanish CC for the period 2015–2019, we have carried out various estimates whose results do not confirm the hypothesis of the existence of such a War of Courts, despite the fears expressed in the legal doctrine on this subject. On the contrary, the results suggest that the CC maintains a favourable attitude towards the Supreme Court, specifically when the ruling is issued by the Plenary of the CC. However, the estimates do not allow us to conclusively reject the existence of such a conflict between the CC and other bodies of the Judiciary besides the Supreme Court.

We ask whether four of the most important U.S. patent system reforms of the last 20 years—elimination of presumptive injunctive relief for victorious patent enforcers in eBay Inc. v. MercExchange, LLC, 547 U.S. 388 (2006); creation of the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) in the America Invents Act; restriction of software’s eligibility for patent protection in Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank Int’l, 573 U.S. 208 (2014); and limitation of patent enforcers’ choice of forum in TC Heartland, LLC v. Kraft Foods Grp. Brands, LLC, 137 S. Ct. 1514 (2017)—had a measurable impact on innovation in the U.S. Specifically, we use a sample of publicly traded firms to construct firm-level measures of innovation and exposure to each reform and adopt a variety of difference-in-differences approaches that assesses how innovation-related activities changed post-reform at relatively exposed versus relatively unexposed firms. We find: a positive association between eBay and R&D spending by firms that were relatively more exposed to patent litigation prior to the Court’s decision; a positive association between the introduction of PTAB proceedings and R&D expenditures by firms that innovate in tech classes where PTAB has been most active; a positive association between Alice and R&D spending by software firms; and a positive association between TC Heartland and R&D spending by firms that thereafter could not be sued in the Eastern District of Texas, a court long associated with opportunistic forum shopping.

We characterize the socially optimal liability sharing rule in a situation where a manufacturer develops an artificial intelligence (AI) system that is then used by a human operator (or user). First, the manufacturer invests to increase the autonomy of the AI (i.e, the set of situations that the AI can handle without human intervention) and sets a selling price. The user then decides whether or not to buy the AI. Since the autonomy of the AI remains limited, the human operator must sometimes intervene even when the AI is in use. Our main assumptions relate to behavioral inattention. Behavioral inattention reduces the effectiveness of user intervention and increases the expected harm. Only some users are aware of their own attentional limits. Under the assumption that AI outperforms users, we show that policymakers may face a trade-off when choosing how to allocate liability between the manufacturer and the user. Indeed, the manufacturer may underinvest in the autonomy of the AI. If this is the case, the policymaker can incentivize the latter to invest more by increasing his share of liability. On the other hand, increasing the liability of the manufacturer may come at the cost of slowing down the diffusion of AI technology.

This article focuses on two different systems of feeding enslaved people. In the first system, primarily associated with the cotton, tobacco, and rice plantations of antebellum South and the early sugar plantations of the British West Indies, the obligation to feed enslaved people was executed by the plantation. In contrast, under a second system known as provisioning associated with the later British West Indian colonies, the master allocated land to enslaved people on which they would grow their own food. Over time, this land was understood, in the wider community of both those enslaved and the planters, to be the “property” of the enslaved person. This article offers potential explanations both for why provisioning was adopted in the West Indies, and why provisioning did not take hold in southern U.S. plantations. Following Ronald Coase’s Nature of the Firm, we should expect to see provisioning when doing so economizes on transaction and agency costs. As it became more difficult to purchase imported food, plantations had to provide their own food. Provisioning sacrificed the plantations’ claims to surplus food, but in the West Indies such decentralized production could enhance incentives for enslaved people to produce their own food while economizing on the need for supervision.