University of Chicago Coase-Sandor Institute for Law & Economics Research Paper Series最新文献

{"title":"Banking Union’s Accountability System in Practice. A Health Check-Up to Europe’s Financial Heart","authors":"Marco Lamandini, David Ramos Muñoz","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3701117","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3701117","url":null,"abstract":"The Single Supervisory Mechanism (SSM) and Single Resolution Mechanism (SRM) are a recent, and remarkable, piece of institutional architecture that form the core of the Banking Union, which comprise national competent supervisory authorities (NCAs) and national resolution authorities (NRAs) combined with the role of an EU institution, the European Central Bank (ECB) and an EU agency, the Single Resolution Board (SRB). The vast array of powers by the two entities, the complexity of coordination, and the fact that decision-making over some of the more sensitive issues in financial policy has been allocated to the EU make accountability a key requisite for the system’s success. Some of the provisions applicable provide a solid foundation for a system of strong accountability. We find however that there may be room for some improvements to effectively counterbalance the powers given to the SSM and the SRB and to increase their accountability at the European level without undermining their independence and within the boundaries of the current legal framework.","PeriodicalId":161847,"journal":{"name":"University of Chicago Coase-Sandor Institute for Law & Economics Research Paper Series","volume":"2 3","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-09-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"113979887","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The United States Climate Change Policies and COVID-19: Poisoning the Cure","authors":"Carolina Arlota","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3896009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3896009","url":null,"abstract":"Climate change is complex during the best of times. It is commonly conceptualized as the quintessential global collective action problem: it affects those who do not contribute to it while the benefits of climate change mitigation measures are not restricted to those who pursue such measures. This conceptualization illustrates the high transaction costs involved in domestic policies as well as in international agreements addressing climate change, and it is of academic and practical interest. As such, this article discusses the current challenges that climate change policies face, focusing on the linkages between the climate change policies of the Trump administration and the COVID-19 pandemic and on the effects of those linkages, both in the United States and globally. Specifically, this article addresses the Trump administration’s attacks on climate science and its deregulatory climate agenda as well as the United States withdrawal from the Paris Agreement on Climate Change. In addition, it discusses principles of international law and the challenges related to state liability for environmental harms in the context of the COVID-19 crisis. This article also assesses how the United States’ climate policies are likely to aggravate inequalities domestically as well as globally in the aftermath of the pandemic. This article offers several original contributions. First, it provides an unique assessment of how the deregulatory climate policies implemented nationally and internationally by the Trump administration have magnified the COVID-19 crisis. Second, the law and economics methodology used in this article validates the claim that improving environmental quality is connected to optimizing early regulatory action. Third, this article discusses the challenges of state liability for climate harms in the aftermath of the United States’ withdrawal from the Paris Agreement and concurrent COVID-19 pandemic. Finally, this article offers relevant insights for the literature on climate change that are likely to be applicable to critical future situations, whether they are health-related, global economic crisis, or climate-related emergencies. Ultimately, this article concludes that, in aggregate, all such climate change policies have contributed to increased pollution, including elevated greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions that have aggravated pre-pandemic inequalities embedded within the United States and among countries. Consequently, the domestic and international policy choices of the Trump administration are worsening the impact of the pandemic, particularly for those in more vulnerable positions, as well as indelibly poisoning the global commons.","PeriodicalId":161847,"journal":{"name":"University of Chicago Coase-Sandor Institute for Law & Economics Research Paper Series","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-07-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125803249","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"A Regulatory Classification of Digital Assets: Toward an Operational Howey Test for Cryptocurrencies, ICOs, and Other Digital Assets","authors":"M. Henderson, Max Raskin","doi":"10.2139/SSRN.3265295","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/SSRN.3265295","url":null,"abstract":"Digital assets are hot right now. Whether cryptocurrencies, like bitcoin, or initial coin offerings and tokens, this new asset class has captured the imagination of American investors. While it remains to be seen if this phenomenon has staying power, there is no doubt that these assets and their promoters have attracted the attention of the Securities and Exchange Commission. But neither Congress nor the SEC has formally elucidated which digital assets are securities and which are not. \u0000 \u0000This Article seeks to provide clarity in determining which digital assets are securities. It proposes two tests that operationalize the Supreme Court’s test in SEC v. W. J. Howey Co. The first test is the Bahamas Test, which asks whether a digital asset is sufficiently decentralized such that it is not a security. The second test is the Substantial Steps Test which is used to determine whether an investment is made with an expectation of profit. This Article takes a rules-based approach to provide clarity and begin a conversation about crafting more predictable jurisprudence and regulation in this area.","PeriodicalId":161847,"journal":{"name":"University of Chicago Coase-Sandor Institute for Law & Economics Research Paper Series","volume":"44 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-10-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114738844","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Case Against Passive Shareholder Voting","authors":"D. S. Lund","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.2992046","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2992046","url":null,"abstract":"American investors have begun to embrace the reality that academics have been championing for decades — that a broad-based passive indexing strategy is superior to picking individual stocks or investing in actively managed funds. But there are several reasons to believe that this trend will have harmful consequences for firm governance, shareholders, and the economy. First, because passive funds seek only to match the performance of an index — not outperform it — they lack a financial incentive to ensure that each of the companies in their very large portfolios are well run. Second, passive funds face an acute collective action problem: any investment in improving the performance of a company will benefit all funds that track the index equally, while only the activist fund incurs the costs. Third, passive funds do not generate firm-specific information as a byproduct of investing and thus must expend additional resources to identify underperforming firms and evaluate interventions proposed by other investors. Such expenditures would undo the cost savings that attracted investors to the passive fund in the first place. \u0000 \u0000For these reasons, many passive funds will leave company performance to the invisible hand of the marketplace. And even if a fund does choose to intervene, it will rationally adhere to a low cost, one-size-fits-all approach to governance. The scope of this problem is potentially immense: as investors continue to flock toward passive investment vehicles, the institutional investors that dominate the passive fund market will increasingly influence and even control the outcome of shareholder interventions — from shareholder votes to those proposed by hedge fund activists — creating widespread economic harm. For that reason, this paper proposes that lawmakers restrict passive funds from voting at shareholder meetings. Doing so will reduce the influence of passive funds in governance and also preserve the role of informed investors as a force for managerial discipline.","PeriodicalId":161847,"journal":{"name":"University of Chicago Coase-Sandor Institute for Law & Economics Research Paper Series","volume":"96 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-03-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126938929","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Patenting Medical Products","authors":"P. Wijesinghe","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3143435","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3143435","url":null,"abstract":"The new creations and innovations which are formulated in the minds of the human minds are recognized as a mode of an intangible property which, people can enjoy a specific set of rights over them. These are called 'intellectual property' as it is attached with the intellect of the people. There are many form of intellectual property which has been granted to the people who are interested in creating and innovating new things. 'Patent is an intellectual property right which protects the innovators' and inventors' rights over new creations or inventions. 'Patenting medical products' have become one of the debated area in the field of Intellectual Property Rights Law, as some people advocate the same while some object. The appropriateness of granting patent rights over medical products will be discussed in this essay.","PeriodicalId":161847,"journal":{"name":"University of Chicago Coase-Sandor Institute for Law & Economics Research Paper Series","volume":"47 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-03-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116194885","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Stalling, Conflict, and Settlement","authors":"William H. J. Hubbard","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3127761","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3127761","url":null,"abstract":"A widely-held assumption in the study of litigation and settlement is that if litigation is costly and settlement bargaining is costless, then in a complete-information setting, all disputes will settle with no need for litigation. This assumption is wrong. Even with complete information, perfectly rational parties may fail to settle out of court, and plaintiffs will spend resources to file suit, only for the parties thereafter to settle in court. This is because, outside of litigation, a strategy of stalling may be optimal for a defendant, and the plaintiff’s only alternative is (costly) litigation. In this paper, I present a simple model demonstrating how stalling occurs, derive empirical predictions from the model, show how the model explains categories of litigation that existing models reliant on private information cannot explain (large numbers of debt-collection cases that are litigated, but no issues are contested), and discuss policy implications (including the limits of prejudgment interest as a tool to encourage settlement).","PeriodicalId":161847,"journal":{"name":"University of Chicago Coase-Sandor Institute for Law & Economics Research Paper Series","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-02-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126137880","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Are Reactors Like Casinos? A Culture of Dependency in Japan","authors":"J. Ramseyer","doi":"10.2139/SSRN.2927168","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/SSRN.2927168","url":null,"abstract":"Japanese communities with nuclear reactors have the reactors because they applied for them, and they applied for them for the money. Among Japanese municipalities, they were some of the most dysfunctional before the reactors had even arrived. Communities depend on young families for the social capital that holds them intact, and these were the communities from which those families had already begun to leave. After the reactors arrived, young families continued to disappear. Unemployment rose. Divorce rates climbed. And in time, the communities had little -- other than reactor-revenue -- to which they could turn.","PeriodicalId":161847,"journal":{"name":"University of Chicago Coase-Sandor Institute for Law & Economics Research Paper Series","volume":"15 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130915140","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Interpreting Contracts via Surveys and Experiments","authors":"O. Ben‐Shahar, L. Strahilevitz","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.2905873","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2905873","url":null,"abstract":"Interpreting the language of contracts is the most common and least satisfactory task courts perform in contract disputes. This article proposes to take much of this task out of the hands of lawyers and judges, entrusting it instead to the public. The article develops and tests a novel regime — the “survey interpretation method” — in which interpretation disputes are resolved though large surveys of representative respondents, by choosing the meaning that a majority supports. The article demonstrates the rich potential under this method to examine variations of the contractual language that could have made an intended meaning clearer. A similar survey regime has been applied successfully in trademark and unfair competition law to interpret precontractual messages, and the article shows how it could be extended to interpret contractual texts. To demonstrate the technique, the article applies the survey interpretation method to five real cases in which courts struggled to interpret contracts. It then provides normative, pragmatic, and doctrinal supports for the proposed regime.","PeriodicalId":161847,"journal":{"name":"University of Chicago Coase-Sandor Institute for Law & Economics Research Paper Series","volume":"19 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-01-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126647567","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Human Rights, Social Choice and a Right to Development: Revisiting Sen","authors":"D. Mohan","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.2880310","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2880310","url":null,"abstract":"A discourse on human rights, is built on including such rights as part of a broader, universal framework (accommodating for moral, ethical claims) that go beyond any constitutionally derived claims and rights or any given set of legitimate laws that are defined by the sovereign of a country. In recent decades, invoking a discussion on safeguarding human rights has become a major way of challenging the level of inequities and oppression within and across countries today that are circumscribing the possibilities of realizing any form of developmental growth. For the purpose of this essay, I am interested in studying the basic formulation of rights, particularly human rights; and exploring its analytical affiliation with the discipline of social choice. A connection that Sen (1999, 2009) draws upon in detail, while arguing for a more inclusive, analytical process in the formulation, recognition of human rights. The social choice approach, as discussed in the essay, has something substantial to offer within the moral, ethical considerations involved in human right(s) formulation by offering a more systematic, non-arbitrary, analytical reasoning basis to the subject. Without getting into the mathematical details of the axioms involved in the theoretical construction of social choice, I draw a general linkage between the formal reasoning behind social choice theory (i.e. involving a diverse set of individual values and preferences in its social welfare function) and its operational connection with human rights.","PeriodicalId":161847,"journal":{"name":"University of Chicago Coase-Sandor Institute for Law & Economics Research Paper Series","volume":"49 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-12-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123625375","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Peru's Selective Default: A Stain on its Creditworthiness","authors":"Arturo C. Porzecanski","doi":"10.2139/SSRN.2728395","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/SSRN.2728395","url":null,"abstract":"In the 1970s, while a leftist military dictatorship ruled Peru, more than 22 million acres of cultivated or grazing farmland -- one-third of Peru’s total agricultural acreage -- were expropriated from thousands of large owners as part of a property reform intended to benefit up to 400,000 landless peasant families. The compensation provided to landowners was miserly, however: on average, it was less than one-tenth the then-prevailing market price of water-accessible, cultivated land. Moreover, about 85 percent of total recognized land values were settled not in cash but with long-term Agrarian Debt Bonds, which committed future governments to honor fixed coupons on obligations maturing in 20 to 30 years. These bonds became worthless during the 1980s, however, because hyperinflation raged and the Peruvian currency lost most of its value. In the wake of the filing of hundreds of lawsuits seeking judicial redress, in 2001 the country’s Constitutional Tribunal ruled that the government should resume payment of the land-reform debt after updating its nominal value on an actuarial basis. And yet, successive administrations did not act on this ruling, despite the fact that since the mid-1990s Peru has exhibited vigorous economic growth, significantly strengthened public finances, and substantially improved creditworthiness, such that governments have had more than the necessary ample fiscal resources to redeem the land-reform bonds at their full, original value. This paper examines the evidence and concludes that we are in the presence of a case of blatant unwillingness to pay, one which undermines Peru’s claim to be a nation that is creditworthy, investor-friendly, and respectful of the rule of law.","PeriodicalId":161847,"journal":{"name":"University of Chicago Coase-Sandor Institute for Law & Economics Research Paper Series","volume":"17 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-01-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134049903","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}