Download or read book Some Thoughts on Law and Economics and the Theory of Second Best written by John J. Donohue and published by . This book was released on 1999 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This paper addresses the implications of the Theory of the Second Best for law and economics scholarship. The theory of the second best is at once fascinating and paralyzing. Fascinating because it so powerfully assaults much of modern economic theory; paralyzing in that it does not offer a clear replacement for what is purports to destroy. Dick Markovits, who has done so much to keep this important theory in the minds of law and economics scholars, gives an example that suggests the difficulty: a tort doctrine is implemented which compels manufacturers to pay the cost imposed by their discharge of pollutants into any body of water. At first blush, the policy change seems unambiguously good. Prior to the doctrinal change, manufacturers who dumped noxious chemicals and metals into bodies of water created "externalities", social costs that they imposed with impunity. As a result, a manufacturer would maximize profits by discharging pollutants whenever there was even the slightest benefit in so doing. In other words, instead of providing an incentive to promote the public good, the presence of large external costs in a market system encourages undeniably harmful activity. It would seem that eliminating this perverse incentive could only be beneficial, and, at least in the absence of the theory of the second best, this logic would be unassailable. But once the disruptive theory of the second best is introduced, all bets are off unless there happens to be no other distortion in the economy, a most unlikely event. The paper examines a variety of applications of the theory, including a paper by Fullerton and Metcalf that demonstrates that many scholars have been unduly optimistic in asserting that pollution taxes will yield the double dividend of a better environment and more tax revenues with less deadweight loss. In so doing, Fullerton and Metcalf have certainly diminished the prospect, advocated by some, that excess pollution taxes will be imposed to reduce the deadweight loss from distortionate labor taxes. Their paper also shows, however, that, as between the competing policies of the pollution tax or the pollution quota, the former is clearly preferable. Since Fullerton and Metcalf also demonstrate why business strongly prefers the quota to the tax, we may have our own ironic version of the second best in operation here. Three states of the world are plausible: 1) the overtaxation state that Fullerton and Metcalf attack; 2) the precise Pigovian tax rate that they presumably endorse; and 3) the command and control regulation (the undertaxation state) that business so strongly prefers. Since the pressures of special interests have clearly biased policy towards state (3), arguments in favor of position (1) might have corrected the political imbalance, thereby making position (2) more likely. Now that Fullerton and Metcalf have strongly denounced position (1), the counterbalance to the special interest bias towards state (3) is removed, making (3), the admittedly worst of the three outcomes, more likely than (2). This is clearly a frustrating aspect of the theory of the second best, because if the analysis of imperfections extends to political failures, then making truthful claims about the undesirability of certain policies may cause more harm than good. It is not hard to see why most academics shy away from this broad conception of the theory.
Download or read book Some Thoughts on Law and Economics and the Theory of Second Best written by John J. Donohue (III) and published by . This book was released on 1998 with total page 34 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Second Wave of Law and Economics written by Megan Richardson and published by Federation Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 156 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How best can the analyses and insights of economics inform legal theory and "improve" legal decision-making? The contribution of the first wave of law and economics scholars was marked by dogmatic adherence to the free market ideals of the Chicago school. Today, the second wave places greater emphasis on empirical data and accepts a much wider range of non-economic values - an approach which offers promise of an objective and balanced reception of law and economics by the courts. This book demonstrates the richness and value of the second wave. The contributors include judges from the High Court of Australia and the Court of Appeal, New Zealand and academics from the Universities of Toronto, Melbourne and Cambridge.
Download or read book Second Best Theory and Law Economics written by Richard S. Markovits and published by . This book was released on 1998 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: According to The General Theory of Second Best, if one or more members of a set of optimal conditions cannot be fulfilled, there is no general reason to believe that fulfilling more of the remaining conditions will bring you closer to the optimum than fulfilling fewer of the remaining conditions. This Article explains that The General Theory implies that unless one can generate an argument to the contrary that focuses on the other Pareto imperfections in the system and the feedback relationships to whose importance it calls attention a policy that reduces the number or extent of Pareto imperfections in the economy without eliminating all such imperfections will be as likely to decrease as to increase allocative (economic) efficiency on that account. After pointing out the dramatic implications of this conclusion for standard law-and-economics analyses of the allocative efficiency of eliminating particular Pareto imperfections, it argues that standard first-best-allocative-efficiency analyses must be replaced with third-best-allocative-efficiency analyses, which take into consideration not only the Pareto-imperfectness and interconnectedness of the economy but also the inevitable cost and inaccuracy of both data and analysis. The Article also lists nine reasons why economists and law-and-economics scholars have failed to switch from first-best to third-best analysis despite the intellectual necessity of doing so.
Download or read book The Future of Law and Economics written by Guido Calabresi and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2016-01-28 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a concise, compelling argument, one of the founders and most influential advocates of the law and economics movement divides the subject into two separate areas, which he identifies with Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill. The first, Benthamite, strain, “economic analysis of law,” examines the legal system in the light of economic theory and shows how economics might render law more effective. The second strain, law and economics, gives equal status to law, and explores how the more realistic, less theoretical discipline of law can lead to improvements in economic theory. It is the latter approach that Judge Calabresi advocates, in a series of eloquent, thoughtful essays that will appeal to students and scholars alike.
Download or read book A Course in Public Economics written by John Leach and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 444 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This 2004 textbook explores how markets operate and governments' roles in addressing market failures.
Download or read book Welfare Economics and Second Best Theory written by Richard S. Markovits and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-05-30 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the implications of The General Theory of Second Best for analyzing the economic efficiency of non-government conduct or government policies in an economically efficient way. It develops and legitimates an economically efficient economic-efficiency-analysis protocol with three unique characteristics: First, the protocol focuses separately on each of a wide variety of categories of economic inefficiency, many of which conventional analyses ignore. Second, it analyzes the impact of conduct or policies on each of these categories of economic inefficiency, primarily by predicting the respective conduct’s/policy’s impact on the distortion that the economy’s various Pareto imperfections generate in the profits yielded by the resource allocations associated with the individual categories of economic inefficiency—i.e., on the difference between their profitability and economic efficiency. And third, it is third-best—i.e., it instructs the analyst to execute a theoretical or empirical research project if and only if the economic-efficiency gains the project is expected to generate by increasing the accuracy of economic-efficiency conclusions exceed the predicted allocative cost of its execution and public financing. The book also uses the protocol to analyze the economic efficiency of specific policies so as to illustrate both how it differs from the protocols that most applied welfare economists continue to use and how its conclusions differ from those produced by standard analysis.
Download or read book Filthy Lucre written by Joseph Heath and published by HarperCollins Canada. This book was released on 2010-06-01 with total page 390 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Economists have a bad reputation. Not only do they assume that everyone is self-interested and amoral, they are almost always cheerleaders for the free market. As a result, most people who do not already share their beliefs ignore everything that economists have to say. This is a problem. Even among the highly educated, economics is a minefield of fallacies and errors. Among those who know little about the subject—a group that includes the average taxpayer and consumer, as well as most journalists, political activists and politicians—almost every widely held belief is false. The level of economic illiteracy is stunning. Filthy Lucre aims to level the playing field and, in this time of enormous market volatility and unprecedented instability, raise our level of economic literacy. Drawing on everyday examples to skewer the six favourite economic fallacies of the right and then the left, we learn why the right wing so wrongly believes that capitalism is the natural order of things, that any tax cut is a good tax cut, and that personal responsibility can solve any problem. And, contrary to how the left feels, why we must resist the urge to fiddle with prices, why the pursuit of profit is not such a bad thing, and why, despite efforts to improve or even fix wages, some jobs will always suck.
Download or read book Behavioral Law and Economics written by Eyal Zamir and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 641 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the past few decades, economic analysis of law has been challenged by a growing body of experimental and empirical studies that attest to prevalent and systematic deviations from the assumptions of economic rationality. While the findings on bounded rationality and heuristics and biases were initially perceived as antithetical to standard economic and legal-economic analysis, over time they have been largely integrated into mainstream economic analysis, including economic analysis of law. Moreover, the impact of behavioral insights has long since transcended purely economic analysis of law: in recent years, the behavioral movement has become one of the most influential developments in legal scholarship in general. Behavioral Law and Economics offers a state-of-the-art overview of the field. Eyal Zamir and Doron Teichman survey the entire body of psychological research that lies at the basis of behavioral analysis of law, and critically evaluate the core methodological questions of this area of research. Following this, the book discusses the fundamental normative questions stemming from the psychological findings on bounded rationality, and explores their implications for setting the law's goals and designing the means to attain them. The book then provides a systematic and critical examination of the contributions of behavioral studies to all major fields of law including: property, contracts, consumer protection, torts, corporate, securities regulation, antitrust, administrative, constitutional, international, criminal, and evidence law, as well as to the behavior of key players in the legal arena: litigants and judicial decision-makers.
Download or read book Law and Macroeconomics written by Yair Listokin and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2019-03-11 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After 2008, private-sector spending took a decade to recover. Yair Listokin thinks we can respond more quickly to the next meltdown by reviving and refashioning a policy approach, used in the New Deal, to harness law’s ability to function as a macroeconomic tool, stimulating or relieving demand as required under certain crisis conditions.
Download or read book Law and Economics in a Nutshell written by Jeffrey L. Harrison and published by West Publishing Company. This book was released on 2000 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Economic Approach to Law Third Edition written by Thomas J. Miceli and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2017-10-17 with total page 803 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Master teacher Thomas J. Miceli provides an introduction to law and economics that reveals how economic principles can explain the structure of the law and make it more efficient. The third edition of this seminal textbook is thoroughly updated to include recent cases and the latest scholarship, with particular attention paid to torts, contracts, property rights, and the economics of crime. A new chapter organization, ideal for quarter- or semester-long courses, strengthens the book's focus on unifying themes in the field. As Miceli tells a cohesive, analytical "story" about law from a distinctly economic perspective, exercises and problems encourage students to deepen their knowledge. A companion website is available at http://www.sup.org/economiclaw. It offers a full suite of resources for both students and professors. Key pedagogical features include cases; discussion points that provide additional analysis of topics in the book; graduate notes, which enrich the text for more advanced readers; and relevant links. Professors have access to sample syllabi for undergraduate and graduate courses and an instructor's manual, which provides answers to all of the end-of-chapter questions and problems in the book.
Download or read book Risk Uncertainty and Profit written by Frank H. Knight and published by Cosimo, Inc.. This book was released on 2006-11-01 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A timeless classic of economic theory that remains fascinating and pertinent today, this is Frank Knight's famous explanation of why perfect competition cannot eliminate profits, the important differences between "risk" and "uncertainty," and the vital role of the entrepreneur in profitmaking. Based on Knight's PhD dissertation, this 1921 work, balancing theory with fact to come to stunning insights, is a distinct pleasure to read. FRANK H. KNIGHT (1885-1972) is considered by some the greatest American scholar of economics of the 20th century. An economics professor at the University of Chicago from 1927 until 1955, he was one of the founders of the Chicago school of economics, which influenced Milton Friedman and George Stigler.
Download or read book The General Theory of Employment Interest and Money written by John Maynard Keynes and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-07-20 with total page 430 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book was originally published by Macmillan in 1936. It was voted the top Academic Book that Shaped Modern Britain by Academic Book Week (UK) in 2017, and in 2011 was placed on Time Magazine's top 100 non-fiction books written in English since 1923. Reissued with a fresh Introduction by the Nobel-prize winner Paul Krugman and a new Afterword by Keynes’ biographer Robert Skidelsky, this important work is made available to a new generation. The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money transformed economics and changed the face of modern macroeconomics. Keynes’ argument is based on the idea that the level of employment is not determined by the price of labour, but by the spending of money. It gave way to an entirely new approach where employment, inflation and the market economy are concerned. Highly provocative at its time of publication, this book and Keynes’ theories continue to remain the subject of much support and praise, criticism and debate. Economists at any stage in their career will enjoy revisiting this treatise and observing the relevance of Keynes’ work in today’s contemporary climate.
Download or read book The Illusion of Free Markets written by Bernard E. Harcourt and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2011-05-01 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is widely believed today that the free market is the best mechanism ever invented to efficiently allocate resources in society. Just as fundamental as faith in the free market is the belief that government has a legitimate and competent role in policing and the punishment arena. This curious incendiary combination of free market efficiency and the Big Brother state has become seemingly obvious, but it hinges on the illusion of a supposedly natural order in the economic realm. The Illusion of Free Markets argues that our faith in “free markets” has severely distorted American politics and punishment practices. Bernard Harcourt traces the birth of the idea of natural order to eighteenth-century economic thought and reveals its gradual evolution through the Chicago School of economics and ultimately into today’s myth of the free market. The modern category of “liberty” emerged in reaction to an earlier, integrated vision of punishment and public economy, known in the eighteenth century as “police.” This development shaped the dominant belief today that competitive markets are inherently efficient and should be sharply demarcated from a government-run penal sphere. This modern vision rests on a simple but devastating illusion. Superimposing the political categories of “freedom” or “discipline” on forms of market organization has the unfortunate effect of obscuring rather than enlightening. It obscures by making both the free market and the prison system seem natural and necessary. In the process, it facilitated the birth of the penitentiary system in the nineteenth century and its ultimate culmination into mass incarceration today.
Download or read book Economic Transformations written by Richard G. Lipsey and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2005-11-03 with total page 636 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the long term economic growth that has raised the West's material living standards to levels undreamed of by counterparts in any previous time or place. The authors argue that this growth has been driven by technological revolutions that have periodically transformed the West's economic, social and political landscape over the last 10,000 years and allowed the West to become, until recently, the world's only dominant technological force. Unique in the diversity of the analytical techniques used, the book begins with a discussion of the causes and consequences of economic growth and technological change. The authors argue that long term economic growth is largely driven by pervasive technologies now known as General Purpose (GPTs). They establish an alternative to the standard growth models that use an aggregate production function and then introduce the concept of GPTs, complete with a study of how these technologies have transformed the West since the Neolithic Agricultural Revolution. Early modern science is given more importance than in most other treatments and the 19th century demographic revolution is studied with a combination of formal models of population dynamics and historical analysis. The authors argue that once sustained growth was established in the West, formal models can shed much light on its subsequent behaviour. They build non-conventional, dynamic, non-stationary equilibrium models of GPT-driven growth that incorporate a range of phenomena that their historical studies show to be important but which are excluded from other GPT models in the interests of analytical tractability. The book concludes with a study of the policy implications that follow from their unique approach.
Download or read book Trade Offs written by Harold Winter and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2013-02-25 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How economists analyze real-world issues from overeating to organ transplants: “A wonderful introduction to economics for the layperson.” —Choice When economists wrestle with issues such as unemployment, inflation, or budget deficits, they do so by incorporating an impersonal, detached mode of reasoning. But economists also analyze issues that, to others, typically do not fall within the realm of economic reasoning, such as organ transplants, cigarette addiction, overeating, and product safety. Trade-Offs is an introduction to the economic approach to analyzing these controversial public policy issues. Harold Winter provides readers with the analytical tools needed to identify and understand the trade-offs associated with these topics. By considering both the costs and benefits of potential policy solutions, Winter stresses that real-world decision making is best served by an explicit recognition of as many trade-offs as possible. This new edition incorporates recent developments in policy debates, including the rise of “new paternalism,” or policies designed to protect people from themselves; alternative ways to increase the supply of organs available for transplant; and economic approaches to controlling infectious disease. Intellectually stimulating yet accessible and entertaining, Trade-Offs will be appreciated by students of economics, public policy, health administration, political science, and law—as well as by anyone who follows current social policy debates. “This precious little book will become widespread reading in basic courses on economics, but every sensible person interested in societal matters and not familiar with law and economics issues should also read it.” —History of Economic Ideas
