Many social scientists rely on the rule of law in their accounts of political or economic
development. Many, however, simply equate law with a stable government capable of …

A new judicial politics of legal doctrine has the potential to resolve foundational dilemmas
and reconcile long-standing and counterproductive scholarly divisions by bringing together …

The past thirty years have seen a dramatic decline in the rate of income convergence across
states and in population flows to high-income places. These changes coincide with a …

In the last decade, economists have produced a considerable body of research suggesting
that the historical origin of a country's laws is highly correlated with a broad range of its legal …

Is financial innovation necessary for sustaining economic growth? To address this question,
we build a Schumpeterian model in which entrepreneurs earn profits by inventing better …

We collect a new dataset on capital punishment in the United States and we propose a test
of racial bias based upon patterns of sentence reversals. We model the courts as minimizing …

We use an important legal event to examine the effect of managerial fiduciary duties on
equity-debt conflicts. A 1991 legal ruling changed corporate directors' fiduciary duties in …

Big Data is considered the greatest innovation or the greatest peril of our times, depending
on whom you ask. The legal system is certainly not immune from its effects. Legal tradition …

This paper provides a quantitative analysis of the effects of the early law-and-economics
movement on the US judiciary. We focus on the Manne Economics Institute for Federal …

It is now widely accepted that the objective of corporate law and corporate governance
should be to promote the wealth and welfare of shareholders. Business managers typically …