International Review of Law and Economics最新文献

Does skill dominate luck in online poker? In many countries around the world, the legality of the online poker industry rests on courts’ evaluation of the “skill dominance” criterion. Because it is not precisely defined, however, the skill dominance criterion may be misleading when it comes to the legal qualification of online gambling activities. We argue that this concept might be better framed as “do skilled players dominate the game” than as “does skill dominate game outcomes”. We introduce a novel, comprehensive dataset on online poker play – where we follow 91,439 players over 40 consecutive months (representing over 85 million hands played) – and develop simple tests to show that (i) skill in the game drives individual results, and (ii) players improve their skills with experience and quit playing the game as a function of starting ability. A lower bound estimate suggests that it takes at least 7 months of full-time training for a novice to acquire the basic skills exhibited by the most experienced players in our data. We conclude that the scholarly debate around this industry may move beyond that of its legality to focus instead on issues of regulation. Beyond the case of online poker, the procedures and tools we develop can be readily transferred to evaluate the skill dominance criterion in other purported games of skill, such as sports betting or stock trading.

Civilian targets of terrorist or criminal attacks (e.g., sport stadiums, chemical or nuclear industry; infrastructure such as ports or pipelines) are often owned by the private agents who choose how to guard against potential attacks. This creates an important externality problem, as some of the benefits of better protection accrue to other private agents who would suffer from an attack. We analyze a model in which a social planner wants to provide incentives for the deployment of defensive technologies. Our results show that some features of the Safety Act, enacted after the 2001 terror attacks, are probably counterproductive.

Ronald Coase pioneered the transaction cost approach to the modern analysis of institutions, contracts, and property rights. We argue that core theory enhances Coase’s transaction cost approach by injecting considerations of coalition formation and stability into the analysis. Analysis of coalitional stability also provides additional insights regarding the nature of transaction costs and the efficiency of institutional arrangements when there are such costs. Overcoming the empty core is potentially an important function of contracts, institutions, and property rights. Empty cores complement transaction costs in rationalizing real-world institutional arrangements.

This study examines the stock market reaction to one of the major environmental disasters of the world mining industry: the Mariana dam collapse in Brazil. Based on an event study, we evaluated the impact on the mining companies’ abnormal returns surrounding the disaster and also investigated whether post-event judicial decisions affected the companies. Our results show a significant negative effect around the days of the event, reporting a 5 % drop in daily returns. Regarding the legal efforts, our findings suggest the coordination time and the benefits granted by authorities as being interpreted positively, reducing market’s expectation of an agile or severe punishment following Mariana’s dam disaster.

This study examines the effect of strict enforcement of the 2008 Labor Contract Law (LCL) on firm employment in China. Although the LCL caused a substantial increase in labor cost, there are no negative repercussions on employment. By contrast, surviving firms continue to increase employment driven by the strong labor demand of the fast-growing Chinese economy. However, compared with non-exposed firms, exposed firms suffered negative repercussions on employment after the enforcement of LCL. Exposed firms exhibited reduced wages after the LCL relative to non-exposed firms, suggesting that wage has a mediation effect on reducing the insurance expenditures of both employers and employees; they also raised productivity considerably after the LCL to absorb the incremental labor costs and survive in the market. However, there are heterogeneous effects of wage and productivity among firms of various ownerships and exporting behaviors.

We provide a quantitative macrohistory of the evolution and coevolution of three fundamental elements of English caselaw: property, contract, and procedure. Our dataset is derived from a comprehensive corpus of reports on early-modern English court cases. Leveraging existing topic-model estimates, we construct annual time series of attention to each of the three legal domains between the years 1552 and 1764 and estimate a structural VAR. Property and procedure are affected for decades by their own shocks. Procedure and property coevolve. In contrast, contract adjusts quickly to its own shocks and does not coevolve with the other two areas of caselaw. We identify the episodes and events outside the legal system that correspond to systemic shocks. Edward Coke was a shock to procedure. The commercial revolution raised attention to contract. The Glorious Revolution, interestingly, did not lead to elevated attention to property issues, but the Civil War and Interregnum did. The evolution of contract, while relatively autonomous from the internal dynamics of the legal system, was, of the three legal domains, least autonomous from society.

This paper investigates how political accountability with voting pressure disciplines rent-seeking behaviors of the government (i.e., fine revenue maximization) by incorporating a two-period retrospective voting model into a law enforcement setting. For minor/major crimes where the pure rent-seeking enforcement is too strict/weak, the democratic process that provides disciplining incentives (e.g., lower discount rates, higher political rents, and fewer forgone collected fines the government must give up in exchange for reelection) makes the rent-seeking government weaken/strengthen enforcement. However, such discipline can still be insufficient and cause inefficient consequences. Additionally, for intermediate crimes, the democratic process can lead to the government’s inefficient pandering to voters and cause welfare deterioration, even compared to the pure rent-seeking enforcement case. The result shows that different types of distortions happen from previous studies when we consider the conflict between the rent-seeking government and citizens.

This paper aims to investigate the effect of the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA) on the deposits held by US global banks through their branches located around the world. Using an unpublished dataset on deposits held by branches of US banks on a geographically unconsolidated basis, we find that the FATCA led to a reduction in deposits held in branches located in tax havens. We find that this effect is more severe in those jurisdictions signing a reciprocal exchange of information agreement. We also advance evidence in support of deposit shifting within the US banking system towards locations without a reciprocal intergovernmental agreement.

Between 2010 and 2012 and with bank stability as the ultimate target, five European countries implemented a tax levy on banks’ liabilities thereby decreasing the cost of equity relative to the cost of debt. Using a difference-in-differences approach we assess the impact of this tax levy on banks’ participation in the syndicated loan market. We further investigate the impact of the tax levy along bank size and capital structure. We find that banks located in countries where the tax levy was implemented supply more credit. This increase is more significant for larger lenders and banks that are more capital constrained.

The party-building reform in China aims to strengthen the party-state control of firms by formalizing the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) role in corporate charters. We employ the reform as an exogenous shock to examine the effect of political influence on corporate valuation in the state-dominated economy. We first develop a hazard model of firms’ responses to the reform and use the predicted hazard rate as a proxy for a firm’s ex ante political influence. We find a positive correlation between firm valuation changes and the predicted hazard rate in the events of party-building reform announcements and a consistent long-term valuation effect based on the difference-in-differences analyses. We also find that the market reacts negatively when firms elect to adopt charter provisions that allow the CCP to control their personnel decisions. Together, our results are consistent with the hypothesis that the effect of party-building reform on a firm’s valuation depends on the trade-off between the benefits from the increased state capture and the costs of state influence in firm governance and that the enhanced political control costs are mitigated for firms with stronger existing political ties. This paper contributes to the literature by introducing a novel and integrated approach to measuring political influence that goes beyond the traditional state ownership measurement and by identifying ex ante political influence as an important factor in corporate valuation.