International Review of Law and Economics最新文献

It has long been argued that efficient policies tend to provide larger legal entitlements to the rich than to the poor. This article shows how efficient legal rules can become even more skewed against the poor over time by sowing the seeds of their own vicious cycles. Repeated application over time of these rules can lead to increasingly adverse outcomes for the poor, which the article calls “policy snowballing”.

Consider a set of polluters choosing between locating in places with rich versus poor people and facing a strict liability rule for harm to earnings. Polluters will disproportionately locate in the poor area, where they face lower damages. That disproportionate share of polluters in the poor area can make it cheaper to harm the poor in the next period, making subsequent polluters locate yet more disproportionately in poor neighborhoods, driving down the poor’s earnings further. And so on.

We identify the conditions for snowballing and explore its dynamics. When compensation for the harm is incomplete, policy snowballing can lead to spiraling income inequality. As a result, government transfers to the poor to compensate for the change in legal regime would be inadequate if calculated in a way that ignores the snowballing. The article raises the intriguing prospect that legal rules could generate state dependence in the legal costs of harm, and that efficient policymaking could be a contributing factor to increasing inequality over time.

Under final offer arbitration (FOA), each party to the dispute submits a proposal to the arbitrator who must choose one of the two submitted proposals in the event an agreement is not reached. A long line of research on FOA has assumed that the submitted proposals to the arbitrator are the final bargaining positions of the parties to the dispute. One consequence of this assumption has been a focus on whether proposals submitted to the arbitrator converge towards one another. However, current practice implies a separation between settlement negotiations and proposals submitted to the arbitrator. We use a simple setting to show that proposal convergence can be consistent with an increase in disputes, a decrease in disputes or no effect on the dispute rate. In order to be fully evaluated, mechanisms which lead to proposal convergence must be embedded in a model in which disputes arise endogenously. Understanding FOA is important because it is a widely used procedure. These uses include labor disputes as well as pricing disputes in the telecommunications industries of the United States and Canada.

A pharmaceutical company that seeks to produce a generic version of a brand drug before patent expiration can trigger a Paragraph IV litigation. However, generic and brand companies may avoid litigation through settlement, which sometimes involves payment to the generic company to delay generic entry. This behavior would be problematic if the settlement option was used to protect patents with low social value. This study explores the relationship between Paragraph IV litigation characteristics and the probability of a Paragraph IV settlement. Examining Paragraph IV settlements from 2003 to 2020, we find that the number of patents being litigated and the years of remaining market exclusivity are the strongest predictors of settlement. Moreover, we find no statistically significant relationship between active ingredient patents and settlement. This information may be helpful to regulators intending to promote the goals of the Hatch-Waxman Act.

The paper investigates all (971) non-executed pending leading cases of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) between 2012 and 2020 through Machine Learning (ML) techniques. Drawing on the extant scholarship, our interest on compliance has centred on state level and case level variables. For the identification of important variables, four databases have been used. Each country party to the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) received 232 distinct factors for eight years. Since we aim to make a parameter estimation for a high-dimensional data set, Simulated Annealing (SA) is employed as feature selection method. In the state level analysis, Support Vector Regression (SVR) model has been applied yielding the coefficients of the variables, which have been found to be important in spelling out non-compliance with the ECtHR decisions. For the case level analysis, different cluster techniques have been utilized and the countries have been grouped into four different clusters. We have found that the states that have relatively high levels of equality before the law, protection of individual liberties, social class equality with regard to enjoying civil liberties, access to justice and free and autonomous election management arrangements, are less susceptible to non-compliance of the decisions of the ECtHR. For the case level analysis, type of violated rights, the existence of dissent in the decision and dissenting votes of national judges for their appointing states affect the compliance behaviour of the states. In addition, a notable result of the research is that if a national judge casts a dissenting vote against the violation judgment of the ECtHR involving the state that appointed him/her, the judgment is likely not to be executed by the respondent state.

We analyze environmental laws and regulations enacted by 125 countries from 1990 to 2021. An examination of the legislation dynamics yields four principal observations. First, countries with a higher degree of development tend to enact more environmental legislation than less developed countries. Second, parliamentary systems are associated with a higher number of environmental regulations compared to presidential systems. Third, legal origin seems to be related to legislation dynamics. Systems of English legal origin generate less new environmental legislation than any other legal family. Fourth, our estimates point out that ruling parties have strong incentives to slow down the dynamics of environmental laws and regulations one year prior to the legislative elections. However, high levels of government effectiveness seem to favor the modernization of environmental legislation in developed countries and parliamentary systems.

Whether a plaintiff is awarded more simply because she has asked for more is a fascinating question. The existing studies are predominantly experimental, as the “control group” in the experiments hardly exists in reality. Using Taiwan’s transaction data on land sales and leases to control for case differences, and matching them with adjudications in the court data, we show that the plaintiff’s claim, even if not based on market evidence, increases the judge’s award. Simultaneous equations model allows us to control for the unobsevables that affect both claims and awards. We also show that the release of public information weakens this effect.

We analyze an injurer’s incentives to improve her information about accident risk. In contrast to the preceding literature, injurers can continuously improve their understanding of the expected harm their activity will impose on others. Regarding social incentives, the marginal benefit from improved risk information is increasing, possibly making either no or a perfect understanding of risk socially optimal. Turning to private incentives when the injurer’s asset constraint is non-binding, strict liability induces the first-best outcome, whereas the negligence rule induces excessive information acquisition. By contrast, when the injurer’s asset constraint is binding, under both liability rules, the injurer’s incentives to acquire information about risk is too small in many circumstances but can also be excessive in other circumstances.

Despite years of economic reform, government-owned enterprises (GOEs) continue to be prevalent in certain sectors of China’s economy. Drawing on empirical evidence from China’s public-private partnership (PPP) market, this article empirically tests whether the theory of the ownership of enterprise can explain the distribution of GOEs in China. It first conducts an empirical study on the disclosed judgments of Chinese courts to show that the enforcement of PPP contracts remains relatively weak in China, which gives rise to the concern of government opportunism. It then presents empirical evidence that the level of government ownership in each project correlates with the chances of government opportunism, which can be measured by project duration, project sector, and renegotiation terms in the contract. These findings show that the level of government ownership is affected by two competing forces—ownership costs and transaction costs. While GOEs incur relatively high ownership costs, they generally incur lower transaction costs because they can curb government opportunism and thus can outcompete private firms in some projects.

Is the evolution of China’s patent litigation courts from a scattered expansion to a shrinking concentration spontaneous or is it a rational construction? Understanding the motivation for the adjustment of China’s patent court system is important for judging whether the system change is appropriate and for choosing the optimal patent litigation system. After addressing the endogeneity between the number of patents and the adjustment of the patent court system using patent incentives as an instrumental variable for the number of patents, responding to the need to protect the growing number of patents appears to be the underlying reason for the expansion of the number of patent courts in China until 2014. The number of patents directly contributed to the growth of the number of patent courts as patent cases proliferated. The downsizing of the patent court after 2014 was, in contrast, a targeted reform initiative in response to the decline in the quality of cases heard due to the increase in the number of patent courts. The adjustment of China’s patent court system thus appears to be the result of rational constructions in response to a changing reality.

We study the market for AI systems that are used to help to diagnose and treat diseases, reducing the risk of medical error. Based on a two-firm vertical product differentiation model, we examine how, in the event of patient harm, the amount of the compensation payment, and the division of this compensation between physicians and AI system producers affects both price competition between firms, and the accuracy (quality) of AI systems. One producer sells products with the best-available accuracy. The other sells a system with strictly lower accuracy at a lower price. Specifically, we show that both producers enjoy a positive market share, so long as some patients are diagnosed by physicians who do not use an AI system. Any transfer in compensation payment from the physician to the AI producer in the case of a diagnostic error will be passed on in full to the physician via the price of the AI system. The quality of the AI diagnosis system is independent of how any compensation payment to the patient is divided between physicians and producers. However, the magnitude of the compensation payment matters. An increase in compensation increases demand for both AI systems. In addition, the higher the compensation paid to the harmed patient, the higher the quality of the low-quality AI system. As the other firm continues to offer the highest accuracy level, any increase in compensation will decrease vertical differentiation, thereby increasing price competition between firms.