International Review of Law and Economics最新文献

Institutional quality is crucial for innovation and economic growth. In this article, we exploit historical linguistic differences across Slovenian municipalities between the Italian, German, and Slovenian-speaking population prior to World War 1, as a plausible exogenous source of variation in firm-level innovation to estimate the effect of institutional quality on innovation. Employing a set of limited dependent variable and instrumental variable models, we show that greater historical exposure to multilingualism is associated with markedly better quality of government and provision of public goods, more impartial local government administration, and lower prevalence of corruption, which in turn predicts systematically more vibrant economic activity, greater economic complexity, and higher rates of firm-level innovation at the local level. The estimated effects are robust to a variety of specification checks and do not appear to be sensitive to the choice of ethnic and linguistic diversity measures.

Although the demand for corporate legal services has grown significantly, so has the pressure on companies to reduce legal costs, thereby necessitating a “data-and-metrics” driven approach to legal fees. Accordingly, we exploit the availability of a unique dataset comprising legal fees that Indian corporations have spent over a 30-year period from 1990 to 2020. We undertake the first cross-sectional analysis of legal fees across various exploratory variables over a long period of time. The results show an increasing trend in the quantum of legal fees incurred by Indian companies during the period. They overwhelmingly suggest that large companies (measured along the lines of total assets, industry segmentation, export and import orientation) spend a higher quantum in legal fees than do small companies. Legal costs are higher for companies that undertake capital raising or mergers and acquisitions transactions in a given financial year than those that do not experience such events. Finally, legal fees tend to be higher in certain industry sectors such as technology and energy where significant contracting, regulatory or other form of legal work is pervasive. It is our expectation that the results and accompanying data analysis will aid purchasers of legal services (being corporations and their in-house legal departments) as well as providers (being law firms and legal professionals) in planning and budgeting for legal fees, and also in devising and implementing appropriate fee arrangements.

Why do some legal disputes fail to settle? From a bird’s eye view, the literature offers two categories of reasons. One consists of arguments based on informational disparities. The other consists of psychological arguments. This paper explores the psychological theory. It presents a model of litigation driven by risk preferences and examines the model’s implications for trials and settlements. The model suggests a foundation in Prospect Theory for the Mutual Optimism model of litigation. The model’s implications for plaintiff win rates, settlement patterns, and informational asymmetry with respect to the degree of risk aversion are examined.

The literature on legal traditions focuses on the comparative macroeconomic effects of legal systems, concentrating on efficiency alone and leaving distributive issues to taxation. However, a country’s legal structure also conditions the primary distribution of income and may have a comparative advantage over taxation as a distributive instrument. We use cross-section and panel estimates to show that the level of income inequality in a country is correlated with its legal system. By several measures of inequality, common law countries are on average more unequal than civil law countries. We explain these results by the nature of the systems. The looser regulation in common law countries limits their capacity to achieve social objectives such as combating income inequality.

We examine an important yet understudied form of reputational sanction in China, namely public criticisms imposed on culpable firms by the Chinese stock exchanges from 2013 to 2018. We find significantly negative cumulative abnormal returns around the announcement date, and they were affected by several factors, including financing propensity, governance mechanism, and equity nature. However, the market reaction is significantly negative only for firms relying on external financing and non-state enterprises, and importantly, becomes insignificant in cases where the firm had self-exposed misconduct before the official announcement of public criticism. Further, we examine other effects of public criticism, finding that public criticism does not improve firms’ long-term values, nor produce strong deterrence to change their behaviour. Overall, the evidence of the effects of public criticism on culpable firms is mixed, suggesting that reputational sanction is a weak, if not ineffective, instrument of market regulation in China.

This paper critically examines J. Mark Ramseyer’s "Contracting for sex in the Pacific War," published in the International Review of Law and Economics, Volume 65, March 2021, Article 105971.

The connection between court resources and judicial behavior has long been acknowledged. This article examines the linkages between local governments' fiscal pressures and Chinese judges' decisions on financial sanctions. Based on data from criminal verdicts of official corruption and county government expenditures, this study finds that Chinese judges are more likely to impose financial penalties, especially fines, when judicial expenditures in a region are low. The conclusion remains unchanged after accounting for the endogeneity problem using the age of the county party secretary and the per capita financial expenditure lagged for one period as instrumental variables. Finally, the imprisonment penalty without increasing revenue is used to test the placebo, and no effect of fiscal pressure on the imprisonment penalty is found.

We investigate the impact of legal insider trading announcements on stock returns in Vietnam. Vietnamese insiders must announce their trading intentions in advance as well as after the actual trade, which contrasts with the vast majority of countries where only post-trade announcement is mandatory. This regulatory setting allows to put to test the predictions from the theoretical models of advance disclosures (Huddart et al., 2004, Lenkey, 2014). Consistent with the theoretical literature, we find that the abnormal returns are large and significant after the pre-trade announcement, showing that the market takes into consideration the information content of the insiders' intention to trade. In addition, no significant stock price effect is found after the announcement of the actual trade occurrence or cancellation. We argue in favor of the implementation of advance disclosure policies since they help mitigate the returns obtained by insiders, better share the profits with outsiders and contribute to a better information dissemination.

Are judges motivated only by policy preferences? Public enforcement of law relies on the use of public agents, such as judges, to follow the law. We use the random assignment of U.S. Federal judges setting geographically-local precedent to document the causal impact of court decisions in a hierarchical legal system. We examine lower court cases filed before and resolved after higher court decisions and find that lower courts are 29%–37% points more likely to rule in the manner of the higher court. The results obtain when the higher court case was decided in the same doctrinal area as the pending case and when the higher court case was decided on the merits. Reversals by the higher court have no significant effects. These results provide evidence that judges are motivated to follow the law and are not solely motivated by policy preferences.

Since the late 1990s, the U.S. has experienced a substantial rise in drug overdose and overdose deaths due to the increased use of opioid drugs. This study estimates the effects of the opioid epidemic on crime relying for identification on geographic variation in the distribution of OxyContin, which in turn was driven by initial state drug prescription policies. Using Uniform Crime Reports (UCR) data, I find that compared to states with stringent prescription policies, states more exposed to OxyContin had 25% higher violent crime rates. Thus, the supply shock of opioids combined with loose policies on prescription drugs created unintended and negative consequences beyond health and mortality. This conclusion is supported by suggestive evidence on mechanisms of mood instability, alcohol abuse, and illegal drug markets.