University of Minnesota Law School Legal Studies Research Paper Series最新文献

{"title":"Tax Avoidance and the Optimal Design of Tax Law","authors":"Philip A. Curry, C. Hill, F. Parisi","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.1383645","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1383645","url":null,"abstract":"Although most individuals recognize the necessity of taxation, few like to pay taxes. Governments face costs to collect taxes; people expend resources to legally avoid taxation. Such expenditure represents social waste, as it is a form of rent-seeking. Since there is a market for tax planning methods, the magnitude of these costs depends on the market structure. We consider how a government might reduce tax planning by creating market inefficiencies or failures. We set forth a formal economic model to identify the optimal amount of tax planning the government should permit, and consider how governmentally-created market failures could be implemented.","PeriodicalId":435342,"journal":{"name":"University of Minnesota Law School Legal Studies Research Paper Series","volume":"7 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-09-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129130076","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":"Indian Trade Lawyers and the Building of State Trade-Related Legal Capacity","authors":"G. Shaffer, J. Nedumpara, Aseema Sinha","doi":"10.2139/SSRN.2390673","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/SSRN.2390673","url":null,"abstract":"This paper examines the growing role of Indian lawyers in the transformation of Indian trade policy through the development of trade-related legal capacity. By trade-related legal capacity we mean, broadly, the ability of a country to use law to engage proactively in the development and defense of international and domestic policy. Such capacity is critical for the drafting and interpretation of international legal agreements, the adoption of domestic regulation within those agreements’ constraints in order to defend policy space, the monitoring of foreign commitments, and the development of legal arguments in formal international litigation and informal dispute settlement. Through developing legal capacity, public and private actors work together to open export opportunities abroad and defend domestic policy measures at home. While others have written of the legalization of international trade through the increased role of the WTO legal secretariat and the emergence of the WTO Appellate Body in international dispute settlement, this paper addresses the growing role of lawyers in the development of trade policy at home in one of the world’s rising powers, India.The paper builds from years of field research in India and Geneva, involving semi-structured interviews with over fifty Indian officials and stakeholders. The interviewees included former Ambassadors, members of the bureaucracy, private lawyers, private trade association and industry representatives, researchers in think tanks, academics, and news reporters. We complemented these interviews with participant observation in Geneva and in New Delhi, and reviewed our findings against primary and secondary documents.","PeriodicalId":435342,"journal":{"name":"University of Minnesota Law School Legal Studies Research Paper Series","volume":"88 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115323793","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":"Quantitative Methods in Comparative Law","authors":"F. Parisi, Barbara Luppi","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.2049907","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2049907","url":null,"abstract":"In the field of comparative law, the use of economic analysis has been at the same time fashionable and controversial. Notwithstanding its controversial acceptance in the discipline, the so-called comparative law and economics method is an important example of the application of economics to areas that were once considered beyond the realm of economic analysis. This article discusses the multiple roles that quantitative economic methods (both theoretical and empirical) can play for comparative legal analysis.","PeriodicalId":435342,"journal":{"name":"University of Minnesota Law School Legal Studies Research Paper Series","volume":"102 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2012-05-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124717572","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":"Regulating Consumer Demand in Insurance Markets","authors":"D. Schwarcz","doi":"10.5553/elr221026712010003001003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5553/elr221026712010003001003","url":null,"abstract":"In recent years, it has become increasingly clear that Expected Utility Theory (EUT) is a remarkably poor theory of how and why individuals purchase insurance. However, the normative implications of this conclusion have remained largely unexplored. This Article takes up this issue. It argues that many observed deviations from EUT are likely the result of mistakes, in the sense that consumers would act differently than they do if they possessed perfect information and cognitive resources. From this perspective, regulatory interventions designed to improve consumer decision-making about insurance are potentially desirable. At the same time, the Article argues that some deviations from EUT may actually reflect sophisticated consumer behavior. In some cases, seemingly puzzling insurance decisions may help consumers manage emotions such as anxiety, regret, and loss aversion, while in other cases they may represent valuable commitment strategies. Because consumers’ insurance decisions may reflect sophisticated, rather than mistaken, decision-making, regulatory interventions that limit consumer choice are normatively troubling. Given these conflicting explanations for EUT’s failure as a descriptive theory of consumer demand in insurance markets, the Article explores a spectrum of “Libertarian Paternalistic” regulatory interventions. It argues that regulatory strategies that aim to encourage presumptively welfare-maximizing insurance decisions without restricting individual choice represent a promising and normatively defensible opportunity for improving consumer behavior in insurance markets.","PeriodicalId":435342,"journal":{"name":"University of Minnesota Law School Legal Studies Research Paper Series","volume":"51 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2010-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125997117","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":"Why Did Rating Agencies Do Such a Bad Job Rating Subprime Securities?","authors":"C. Hill","doi":"10.5195/LAWREVIEW.2009.148","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5195/LAWREVIEW.2009.148","url":null,"abstract":"Why did rating agencies do such a bad job rating subprime securities? The conventional answer draws heavily on the fact that ratings are paid for by the issuers: Issuers could, and do, “buy” high ratings from willing sellers, the rating agencies. The conventional answer cannot be wholly correct or even nearly so. Issuers also pay rating agencies to rate their corporate bond issues, yet very few corporate bond issues are rated AAA. If the rating agencies were selling high ratings, why weren’t high ratings sold for corporate bonds? Moreover, for some types of subprime securities, a particular rating agency’s rating was considered necessary. Where a Standard & Poor’s rating was deemed necessary by the market, why would Standard & Poor’s risk its reputation by giving a rating higher (indeed, much higher) than it knew was warranted? Finally, and perhaps most importantly, giving AAA ratings to securities of much lower quality is something that can’t be done for long. A rating agency that becomes known for selling its high ratings will soon find that nobody will be paying anything for its ratings, high or low. In my view, that issuers pay for ratings may have been necessary for the rating agencies to have done as bad a job as they did rating subprime securities, but it was not sufficient. Many other factors contributed, including, importantly, that rating agencies “drank the Kool-Aid.” They convinced themselves that the transaction structures could do what they were touted as being able to do: with only a thin cushion of support, produce a great quantity of high-quality securities. Rating agencies could take comfort, too, or so they thought, in the past - the successful, albeit short, recent history of subprime securitizations, and the longer history of successful mortgage securitizations. “Issuer pays” did not so much make the rating agencies give higher ratings than they thought were warranted as it gave the agencies a “can do” mindset regarding the task at hand - to achieve the rating the issuers desired, working with them to modify the deal structures as needed. That the issuers were paying motivated the agencies to drink the Kool-Aid; having drunk the Kool-Aid, the agencies gave the ratings they did. My account casts doubt on the efficacy of many of the solutions presently being proposed and suggests some features that more efficacious solutions should have.","PeriodicalId":435342,"journal":{"name":"University of Minnesota Law School Legal Studies Research Paper Series","volume":"136 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2009-04-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131268266","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":"Should the Prosecutor Pay for Failure of Conviction?","authors":"Nuno Garoupa, F. Parisi","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.2145003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2145003","url":null,"abstract":"Loser-pays-all rules are frequently used by modern legal systems to compensate the party who prevails in a civil case for the legal fees and costs incurred during a civil trial. Loser-pays-all rules are not used in criminal cases. Public prosecution bears the cost of its prosecutorial efforts and defendants bear the cost of their defense. A criminal defendant that is brought to trial and found not guilty is usually not compensated for the defense costs incurred. Likewise, prosecutorial expenses are not compensated by guilty defendants. In this paper we develop an economic model to consider the application of a loser-pays-all rule in criminal law. We consider the effects of this hypothetical rule on the case selection by prosecutors, and on the possible signaling effect of prosecutor's choice. We further consider the effect on defendant's decision to plead guilty, and the impact of this rule on wealth constraints that generally affect defendant's ability to secure valid legal defense.","PeriodicalId":435342,"journal":{"name":"University of Minnesota Law School Legal Studies Research Paper Series","volume":"20 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2006-03-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116591226","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}