LSN: Law & Economics: Public Law (Topic)最新文献

{"title":"Does Shaming Pay? Evaluating California's Top 500 Tax Delinquent Publication Program","authors":"Chad Angaretis, Brian Galle, Paul R. Organ, Allen C. Prohofsky","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3950490","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3950490","url":null,"abstract":"Many U.S. states and countries around the world publicly disclose tax debtors to encourage compliance. Little is known about the effectiveness of these programs. Using administrative tax microdata from California’s “Top 500” disclosure program, we study whether notices of imminent publication affect payment and other compliance outcomes, as well as whether these notices affect subsequent reported earnings. We estimate the direct effect of the letter sent to the 500 highest-balance, publication-eligible taxpayers to be additional revenue of between $2.8 and $7.2 million annually, with no evidence of an impact on subsequent reported earnings. We also estimate an upper bound on the deadweight loss caused by publication of non-compliers, and conclude that the program generates positive net social welfare. Together, these results suggest that delinquent taxpayer disclosure can be an efficient tax enforcement tool, at least among the relatively high-income population we study.","PeriodicalId":231496,"journal":{"name":"LSN: Law & Economics: Public Law (Topic)","volume":"23 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-10-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128155579","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 Ramsey Rule at 100: Pairing Back the Overgrowth","authors":"C. Sanchirico","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3925625","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3925625","url":null,"abstract":"In 1927 the mathematician Frank Ramsey published a paper on optimal taxation in which he put forward what has come to be known as the “Ramsey rule”. Nearly one hundred years later, Ramsey’s paper remains a go-to reference for normative tax theory in a number of fields, including legal scholarship. This paper reviews the reasoning behind the Ramsey rule and attempts to clear up various points of confusion that have grown up over decades of perfunctory citation. It explains in simple terms what the rule is and how it is derived. It then critically analyzes the rule’s most prevalent interpretations, arguing that these range from uninformative to misleading. An online mathematical appendix is available at https://ssrn.com/abstract=3925626.","PeriodicalId":231496,"journal":{"name":"LSN: Law & Economics: Public Law (Topic)","volume":"215 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-09-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131774051","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":"Monetary Finance","authors":"Brian Galle, Yair Listokin","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3885966","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3885966","url":null,"abstract":"Conventional economic wisdom holds that governments cannot pay their bills by printing money. Running the printing press—or, at modern central banks, tapping a few keys to create electronic funds—causes inflation, and inflation can destroy economies. Yet as it turns out, since 2008 developed countries throughout the world have in effect printed trillions of dollars’ worth of new money without any real hint of inflation. In the United States, for example, this “monetary finance” has amounted to ⅓ of all deficit spending over the last decade. The power of central banks to finance government at this scale should transform how we think about the fiscal state, our system of taxing and spending. Yet because this phenomenon is new, runs contrary to decades of theory, and is not yet fully understood, little scholarship yet grapples with how governments should use monetary finance. Most nations’ basic architectures for revenue and spending decisions assume that taxes and government borrowing are the primary sources of government finance. What should happen to fundamental legal rules, such as balanced-budget requirements, debt ceilings, or the tax legislative process, when central banks are also key players in financing national expenditures? And how should the structure of central banks change to reflect this new power, which could turn into a dangerous temptation? We explore those questions here, and our answers in large part depend on our unique position in the monetary finance debate. A group of heterodox scholars, known collectively under the banner “Modern Monetary Theory,” claim that central banks can essentially print money endlessly without cost, and that taxes serve at most a secondary role in government finance. We disagree. Instead, we argue, the conditions under which monetary finance offers an attractive alternative to taxation occur only rarely and for a limited time, though that time happens to be right now. Our key structural recommendations thus turn on what we see as the contingent nature of seigniorage. Opportunities to finance government cheaply without serious inflation risk are like mineral wealth: valuable but limited. We therefore propose institutions that treat monetary finance opportunities much as oil-rich countries treat their oil revenues. And we sketch ways in which central banks can decide when to employ monetary finance, while preserving their independence from political actors who would exploit it for temporary gains.","PeriodicalId":231496,"journal":{"name":"LSN: Law & Economics: Public Law (Topic)","volume":"23 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-09-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122054557","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 Output-Welfare Fallacy: A Modern Antitrust Paradox","authors":"J. Newman","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3866725","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3866725","url":null,"abstract":"A fallacy lies at the core of modern antitrust. The ascendance of the consumer welfare standard is a story often told. Yet existing narratives overlook the pivotal role that output has played--and continues to play--in shaping the contemporary antitrust enterprise. That role has gone unnoticed by most observers, but the antitrust orthodoxy correctly observes that output has become the \"Holy Grail,\" the \"touchstone,\" and the \"sine qua non\" of antitrust. Bork, Posner, Easterbrook, and their intellectual brethren uniformly insisted that output should be the exclusive criterion for analysis, a position premised on the assumption that output effects are a viable stand-in for welfare effects. This output–welfare framework entered mainstream discourse, was endorsed by leading scholars and enforcement authorities, and was outcome-determinative in the Supreme Court’s recent Ohio v. American Express opinion. This Article undertakes the first systematic evaluation of the widely assumed link between output and welfare. Under sustained scrutiny, the outputist paradigm breaks down. A wide variety of antitrust-relevant conduct pushes output and welfare in opposite, conflicting, or disconnected directions. Moreover, output-based analysis is often unworkable in markets—for labor, social networking, online search, and more—that are of particular interest to contemporary antitrust. Recognizing the Output–Welfare Fallacy offers substantial benefits for antitrust analysis. Outputist judicial decisions, which rest on a fundamental illogic, can safely be jettisoned. Market power can best be defined as the power to control competition, instead of power to profitably reduce output. Plaintiffs need not demonstrate an output reduction to carry the initial burden of proof. Conversely, defendants need not prove an output increase to make out a valid procompetitive justification. Moving beyond the narrow confines of output-based analysis thus enables the application of a more coherent, administrable, and efficient antitrust framework.","PeriodicalId":231496,"journal":{"name":"LSN: Law & Economics: Public Law (Topic)","volume":"10 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-06-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125239876","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":"Potential Competition and Antitrust Analysis: Monopoly Profits Exceed Duopoly Profits","authors":"S. Salop","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3839631","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3839631","url":null,"abstract":"This short note prepared for an OECD meeting in June 2021 examines several antitrust issues involving analysis of potential competition. While the analysis is not new, it is still useful to collect them together in a unified fashion to show how they are related. In this regard, all the analysis and conclusions flow from the overarching (and obvious) points that exclusionary conduct and agreements that maintain monopoly power very often harm consumers, and that monopoly profits typically exceed the combined duopoly profits earned by the dominant firm and the entrant, if there is successful entry. While this is not inevitably the outcome, it is a useful working assumption for most market situations involving acquisitions, exclusion or agreements with potential or nascent competitors.","PeriodicalId":231496,"journal":{"name":"LSN: Law & Economics: Public Law (Topic)","volume":"13 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-04-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116482969","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":"Introduction to Law and Economics for Civil Law Systems","authors":"E. Mackaay","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3804995","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3804995","url":null,"abstract":"Amongst the social sciences, it is economics that has made the most promising advances for law. There are several reasons for this: it has a well-developed theoretical framework (microeconomics); it provides currently the most advanced application of the rational choice model, which is one of the elements unifying the social sciences; it has given rise to applications in all fields of law and its scientific literature continues to grow at a rapid pace fed by new generations of scholars taking over from the founders. Two remarkable discoveries have fired the interest of lawyers in this approach. The first is that, in studying different institutions that are part of American common law in this light, researchers found that nearly all of the rules looked formulated as if the purpose was to maximise social welfare, the target value to be maximised in economic analysis. The second, related discovery is that rules formulated as if aimed at maximising social welfare, called efficient in economic parlance, often correspond to what lawyers’ intuition would consider fair or just rules. These findings are no less relevant outside the United States, in civil law systems as well as in other common law systems. Law practice asks what legal rules are applicable to a given case, how rules hang together consistently and, possibly, what rule would be desirable. Law and economics asks what are the social effects of the applicable rules, and looks for their justification and desirability in terms of those effects. In a nutshell, that is the difference between the two but also their complementarity.","PeriodicalId":231496,"journal":{"name":"LSN: Law & Economics: Public Law (Topic)","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-03-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125880561","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":"Sunlight is the Best Disinfectant – Or Is It? Anonymity as a Means to Enhance Impartiality","authors":"E. Zamir, C. Engel","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3800593","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3800593","url":null,"abstract":"When people make decisions on behalf of others, there is a risk that they would prioritize their own interests over those they are supposed to promote. According to common wisdom, transparency and accountability are the best cure for this problem. This Article argues, counterintuitively, that while transparency is generally beneficial, sometimes concealing the identity of the decision-maker may be advisable. Anonymity can insulate the decision-maker from external pressures and temptations, thereby facilitating prudent and disinterested decisions. This is especially (but not uniquely) true when the expected gainers and losers from a given decision are in a similar position in terms of their ability and motivation to harm, or reward, the decision-maker. Anonymity may also improve decisions when the optimal choice is expected to be unpopular. The Article reviews the legal, economic, and psychological rationales of transparency and accountability, their prospects and limitations. It then surveys instances in which anonymity is already in use, such as the empaneling of anonymous juries, the composition of the S&P Index Committee, peer review processes, and more. Finally, the Article offers detailed guidelines for the design of new anonymous processes and the assessment of existing ones. These include intermediate solutions and combinations of anonymity and accountability.","PeriodicalId":231496,"journal":{"name":"LSN: Law & Economics: Public Law (Topic)","volume":"17 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-03-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"120850617","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":"Does Money Really Matter? Lab-In-The-Field Evidence from Syrian Refugees in Jordan","authors":"Lamis Saleh, S. Voigt","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3779191","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3779191","url":null,"abstract":"The use of monetary incentives in behavioral experiments has been debated between economists and psychologists for a long time. This paper extends the question of the differences in behavior to a very specific population, namely Syrian refugees in Jordan. Syrian refugees lost a lot because of the civil war which might make them particularly sensitive to monetary incentives. Alternatively, after having experienced many potentially traumatizing events, monetary incentives might be of secondary importance. We examine the levels of altruism and the levels of trust among two samples, one incentivized through hypothetical points and the other incentivized through monetary payoffs. Members of the two groups do not differ in altruism levels and show the same degrees of trust suggesting that monetary incentives are of only secondary importance in behavioral experiments with refugees.","PeriodicalId":231496,"journal":{"name":"LSN: Law & Economics: Public Law (Topic)","volume":"35 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-02-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125574104","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":"Technocratic Pragmatism, Bureaucratic Expertise, and the Federal Reserve","authors":"Peter Conti-Brown, David A. Wishnick","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3754523","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3754523","url":null,"abstract":"The Federal Reserve (Fed) regularly faces novel challenges to its broad statutory mandates Often, these challenges—from financial crises to pandemics to climate change—raise a critical question When should the Fed act beyond the boundaries of its core institutional identity and expertise? On the one hand, some voices demand the Fed “stay in its own lane,” avoiding experimentation so that it may preserve its perceived legitimacy to carry out core historical func-tions On the other, hewing too closely to precedent and existing expertise risks institutional fail-ure of a different sort To navigate that tension, this Feature sketches an ethos of technocratic pragmatism—one that permits the Fed to develop the expertise necessary to address emergent problems as long as it remains constrained by norms designed to preserve its long-run legitimacy We illustrate the ethos by examining three cases where the Fed has confronted, or is confronting, challenges that test the boundaries of its expertise: engagement with cyber risk, emergency lending before and during the COVID-19 pandemic, and nascent efforts to understand the intersection of central banking and global climate change We also engage with cases where the Fed has transgressed legitimacy-pre-serving limits by intervening in policy disputes beyond the range of its statutory concerns Taken together, these cases illustrate how the Fed must walk a fine line between valuable experimentation and the usurpation of politics © 2020, Yale Journal on Regulation All rights reserved","PeriodicalId":231496,"journal":{"name":"LSN: Law & Economics: Public Law (Topic)","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-12-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130787228","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":"Effects of Ending Payments for Ecosystem Services: Removal Does not Crowd Prior Conservation Out","authors":"Lina Moros, M. Vélez, A. Pfaff, Daniela Quintero","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3754598","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3754598","url":null,"abstract":"We implemented a decision experiment in the field with rural peasants in Colombia to test the effects of introducing then partially or totally removing Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES). We consider individual and collective payments and different rules for removal. We find that there is clearly no behavioral ‘crowding-out’ when a PES is created then ended. Even a simple pre-versus-post-PES comparison finds ‘crowding in’, if anything, with contributions higher after PES was removed than before PES was introduced. Comparing to a control, without PES, strengthens that conclusion. We discuss four possible mechanisms explaining these findings: recognition or gratitude; lack of negative emotions; pre-existing and persistent intrinsic motivations, and evocation of pro-environmental behavior.","PeriodicalId":231496,"journal":{"name":"LSN: Law & Economics: Public Law (Topic)","volume":"64 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-12-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116601107","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}