International Review of Law and Economics最新文献

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.

In this article, we perform sensible robustness checks and estimation techniques that are broadly applicable to researchers studying the effects of concealed carry laws and apply them to recent work by Moody and Lott (2022). While Moody and Lott claim to have found that shall-issue and permitless-carry laws reduce homicide using data ending in 2014, our event-study analysis demonstrates that their model violates the conditional parallel-trends assumption. Additionally, applying methodology from Broderick et al. (2021), we show Moody and Lott’s results are highly sensitive to the removal of a small number of observations. We examine and reject Moody and Lott’s hypothesis that early- and late-adopting “shall-issue” states experienced different outcomes through sensitivity testing of their early–late threshold and applying the Goodman-Bacon (2021) decomposition. Following De Chaisemartin and d’Haultfoeuille (2020), we show Moody and Lott’s results are biased by heterogeneous treatment effects. Overall, our results highlight the importance of conducting principled validity and sensitivity checks before introducing outlier estimates into the empirical literature.

This work studies for the first time the effect on crime deterrence of variability in punishment under different assumptions on criminals risk preferences. We show that when criminals are risk averse, greater variability in punishment reduces the incentive to commit crimes, and that the opposite holds in the case of risk loving. The linkages between certainty of punishment, initial wealth and the incentive to commit crimes are also analyzed. We then analyze the effects of greater variability in punishment on deterrence policies founded on punishment severity, showing that this effect is positive if criminals are prudent and negative if they are imprudent. Lastly, we analyze for the first time variability in punishment as an instrument of deterrence policy. This analysis determines the optimal level of variability in the two cases of homogeneity and heterogeneity in risk preference.

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.

Borrower-friendly laws, such as recourse restrictions and judicial foreclosures, impose higher costs and risks to lenders. Yet, there is little evidence on how lenders transfer them to borrowers at the mortgage origination. By exploiting the mortgage law heterogeneity across U.S. states, I show that recourse restrictions trigger a collateral channel, through which lenders require a 1.6 to 1.9 percentage points lower loan-to-value ratio to compensate for worse recovery opportunities and respective higher expected loss. This effect holds both before and after the Great Recession, and is robust to a regression discontinuity design approach. I also find that lenders do not penalize strategic defaults when recourse is not allowed. Regarding the impact of judicial requirements, the findings are mixed.

Unrestricted publication of judicial opinions and full transparency of judicial action are often considered a means to increase information relevant for future litigants and public discourse. In this paper, we analyze a model that captures the potential for unintended consequences of such policies. Under certain conditions, unrestricted publication of judicial opinions, full transparency of judicial behavior at trial and oral argument enabled by telecasting, and other forms of surveillance of judicial behavior may induce judges to obscure their opinions and actions leading to less information for the public over time. Unrestricted publication and full transparency of judicial action should be carefully considered as a policy preference.