Posts filed under ‘Law and Economics’
Airlines Go Medieval
| Dick Langlois |
Like me, you’ve probably received more than one email today from U. S. air carriers, signed by the CEOs of all the major players, blaming the increase in fuel prices on — you guessed it — speculators. They direct you to a website at which you can send a pre-fab letter to your legislator. Here’s what the site says:
The oil price bubble is unfairly taxing American families and restricting our nation’s economic potential. While everyone is aware that supply and demand constraints contribute to price increases, there’s another force at work that, like gravity, is invisible yet powerful. This force is rampant speculation.
Every time you buy products such as food or gas, you are impacted by unregulated, secretive and often foreign commodities futures markets. Speculators in these markets are increasingly buying and selling commodities such as oil even though they have no intention of using the product. As unregulated speculators pocket billions of dollars at your expense, the price of commodities has increased out of proportion to marketplace demands.
Apparently, fear of secretive foreigners plays as well in the age of The Da Vinci Code as it did in the age of da Vinci. I invite you to do what I did: use their system to send a message contrary to what the airlines wish you to say. Here is what I said. Feel free to cut and paste.
The airlines are bombarding you with letters about the depredations of speculators. Because speculation seems arcane and mysterious to those untrained in economics, it has been an easy target since ancient times. Economists understand — and I imagine the airlines actually do as well — that speculation is in fact an efficient response to uncertainty. High fuel prices result from real supply and demand shocks as well as from uncertainty about the future of oil supply and demand. That uncertainty is a real economic phenomenon, and it can’t be wished away. By asking you to “stop” speculation, the airlines are really just asking you to transfer income to them and away from others. I find it particularly ironic that among the signatories of the letter was the chairman of Southwest Airlines, which for years has successfully speculated in fuel prices. Southwest never asked you to intervene when they benefited from long-term fuel contracts at below-spot-market prices. Don’t listen to them now.
More on the Economic Organization of Law Firms
| Peter Klein |
As a follow up to these comments about the organizational structure of professional-services firms, law firms in particular, note Tom Ulen’s remarks on some recent trends, e.g., the growing importance of specialized, niche firms that provide specific services to corporate clients on a short-term basis.
Searle Center Conference on the Economics and Law of the Entrepreneur
| Peter Klein |
I used to judge an academic conference by the number of big-name scholars in attendance. Now I look for big-name bloggers. What a delight, then, to be at the Searle Center Conference on the Economics and Law of the Entrepreneur with two of my favorite bloggers, Gordon from Conglomerate and Lynne from Knowledge Problem. The conference, organized by Dan Spulber, brings together economists and legal scholars to grapple with the challenges facing entrepreneurship research. Today’s sessions focused on venture finance and law, and tomorrow’s deal with economic growth, innovation, and the social context of entrepreneurship. I’m moderating a session featuring Simon Parker, Mirjam van Praag, Doug Cumming, Robert Miller, and Linda Yueh. The papers are available at the conference site and a selection will appear in a special issue of JEMS.
This the second Searle Center event I’ve attended this year and I’ve been impressed with both. The Center is only a year old but, under Henry Butler’s guidance, has already established itself as a major player in the fields of regulatory and entrepreneurial studies.
More on Agricultural Adaptation: Johnny Appleseed
| Dick Langlois |
The abstract of a new paper called “Alertness, Local Knowledge, and Johnny Appleseed” recently crossed my computer screen. By a grad student at George Mason called David Skarbek, the paper applies a Kirznerian account of entrepreneurship to the case of Johnny Appleseed, aka John Chapman (1774-1845). The entrepreneurial part will no doubt be of interest to many readers, including my estimable co-bloggers. But I’m more interested in the historical and institutional angle.
Skarbek points out that, contrary to the Disney-fueled myth, Johnny Appleseed didn’t scatter apple seeds randomly throughout Appalachia and the midwestern frontier. He planted clearly defined apple groves, totaling some 1,200 acres by the time of his death. This turned out to be crucial for homesteading, since under American state law the planting of fruit trees was one way to create a property right (in Lockean fashion) out of unowned land. Chapman was thus an institutional entrepreneur.
What Skarbek doens’t say, however, is something I learned at the NBER conference I wrote about earlier. In addition to having what we would nowadays call mental health issues, Chapman was also an evangelical Swedenborgian who shared with Thoreau the view that apples should aways be grown from seeds. (For documentation, see for example here.) In fact, apple trees grown from seeds are good for only one thing — cider — and, indeed, the Johnny Appleseed legend got a boost in Appalachia during Prohibition as the fruits (as it were) of his efforts were used for hard cider. Apple cultivation normally requires grafting, a form of hybridization known for centuries and practiced in Appleseed’s lifetime by the likes of Thomas Jefferson. The point is that Chapman saw hybridization as unnatural and immoral, and his quest was animated as much or more by this religious view as by environmentalist zeal or entrepreneurial insight. As the mention of Thoreau suggests, however, distaste for “unnatural” breeding methods is not exclusive to religious fundamentalists, and indeed today it is followers of Thoreau not (generally) Christian evangelicals who object to genetically modified organisms.
Mike and Me on Externalities
| Peter Klein |
Mike Moffatt responds to my post on externalities. I questioned the Pigouvian approach of using taxes as efficient remedies for negative externalities. I said if, say, carbon taxes are a good idea, then Pigouvian taxes on a range of activities that generate negative externalities should be even better. And what about Pigouvian subsidies? I rarely see members of the Pigou club explain what activities they would subsidize, at what rates, and with what resources.
Mike’s response, based on more detailed comments here, is interesting, but to my mind misses the main point. Pigouvian taxes aren’t perfect, Mike says, but neither are income taxes or excise taxes or any other taxes. Fine, I say, but the relevant comparison isn’t between Pigouvian taxes and other taxes, but between Pigouvian taxes and alternative institutions for dealing with externalities such as cap-and-trade, common-law tort remedies, etc. (more…)
Elgar Catalog Covers Getting Weird
I said before how much I liked the cover of Edward Elgar’s law catalog, which shows two stick figures holding megaphones and shouting at each other. The image on the business and management catalog (below, left) is pretty good too. But I don’t understand the economics catalog (below, middle), which pictures a family standing under an umbrella. Is it about saving for a rainy day? (What would Lord Keynes say?)
Today I get a pamphlet advertising Elgar’s “Economic Approaches to Law Series,” which has excellent edited contributions by Levitt, Posner, Epstein, Ben Klein, and others but an even weirder cover. This one shows the two guys with megaphones shouting at the family under the umbrella! What could they be saying to these poor people? “Consider the liability rule before opening that pointy umbrella in a crowd!” “Do you know your marginal damage cost of wetness?”
Tom Ulen is Blogging
| Peter Klein |
Tom Ulen, Swanlund Chair and Director of the Illinois Program in Law and Economics at the University of Illinois College of Law, is online at the Law & Econ Prof Blog. Tom’s textbook (with Robert Cooter), Law and Economics, is now in its fifth edition and continues to be a fine introduction to the L&E literature.
I was going to write “Welcome to the blogosphere!” until I discovered that he’s been doing this longer than we have.
Manne on Ideology and the Law-and-Economics Movement
| Peter Klein |
Josh Wright has written a thoughtful and informative series on the future of law and economics (1, 2, 3, 4). Key issues include the increasing formalism of L&E scholarship, the place of L&E within law schools (as opposed to economics departments), and the influence of L&E on legal practice and public policy.
The latest entry focuses on a response to Josh by Henry Manne, the founder of the modern law-and-economics movement (and, I might add, a regular reader of O&M). Manne argues that ideology, more than genuine scientific disagreement, explains the often-hostile reaction to L&E within the legal establishment, a theme we’ve explored in several posts (1, 2, 3, 4, 5).
I think that the major issues are now, as they were fifty years ago, mainly ideological, and I believe that the causes forcing L&E out of the law schools today are the very same ones that operated to prevent my getting better jobs in the 1960s and for most senior law professors to think that what I was advocating was sheer nonsense, “to the right of Genghis Kahn,” as they used to be so stupidly amused at repeating ad nauseum. They were protecting their intellectual investment in skills and ideology against the threat of a new paradigm in which they could not share the rents, and I do believe that that is exactly what is still happening. While you and I see enormous social benefits from a legal system based on the idea of property rights and their protection, all they see is less role for the government and themselves. Perhaps this acts at an unconscious level, but it unmistakably is at work whatever the source of the peculiar leftist ideology of most academics.
What I am saying is that it is impossible to separate completely a discussion of the role of L&E in legal education from the ideological aspects of the subject. I honestly believe that at some level the turn of L&E to econometrics and empirical work is a flight from the implications of a thoroughgoing Alchianesque kind of economics. Perhaps that is even more clear with the current popularity of Behavioral Economics, and of late I even notice in the literature a somewhat open attack on the very idea of freedom of contract. I do not think these developments are accidental or random; I believe that they are inherent in the very structure of modern universities and law schools.
A Question for the Pigou Club
| Peter Klein |
A few years ago Greg Mankiw coined the term Pigou Club, a label for those (like himself) who advocate higher Pigouvian taxes on gasoline consumption and other high-carbon-footprint activities. Personally, I don’t find the Pigouvian analysis very convincing, in this or the more general case. First, the idea of efficient Pigouvian taxes and subsidies ignores subjective value and the Hayekian knowledge problem. How can government officials possibly choose tax or subsidy amounts that compensate for the actual harm suffered by, or benefit enjoyed by, all possible third parties for all activities generating externalities? The problem is several orders of magnitude more complex than what is typically described in the the textbooks. As a mechanism design problem, it is as difficult as the general socialist calculation problem itself (and you know how I feel about that). Second, the Pigouvian approach ignores comparative institutional analysis altogether. What are the efficiency consequences of establishing, empowering, and funding a government agency to compute and implement Pigouvian taxes and subsidies? Where will the tax revenues go? How will the subsidies be financed? What are the effects of these distortions?
My preference is to treat “negative externalities” as torts, with property titles assigned by the homesteading principle rather than Coasean wealth maximization criteria. (Essentially the Rothbardian view.)
But my main beef with today’s Pigouvians is that they cherry-pick a case here and there — taxes on gasoline, primarily — without fully pursuing the implications of the analysis. If increasing gasoline taxes is efficient, why stop there? What other market failures should the state be empowered to remedy? Here’s my question, specifically:
Please name the activities you believe deserve Pigouvian subsidies. For each activity provide the efficient subsidy amount, explain how this was calculated, and say how the revenues should be raised.
I don’t recall Mankiw discussing Pigouvian subsidies on his blog. Greg, help us out!
NIE Workshop for Law Professors
| Peter Klein |
The University of Colorado invites law professors to a one-day workshop, 11 June 2008, on the new institutional economics. Speakers are Lee Alston, Lynne Kiesling, Gary Libecap, Henry Smith, and Tom Ulen. Contents include:
(1) an introduction to NIE and why it matters to legal scholarship, particularly for property and intellectual property law; (2) an introduction to behavioral economics and experimental economics, including a simulation exercise that will demonstrate how experimental economics can be used to examine institutions in practice; and (3) an interactive discussion where all participants examine some case studies to evaluate the payoffs of using NIE and experimental economics to evaluate the merits of different legal regimes.
Sounds like fun (but where’s the theory of the firm?). Thanks to Thom Lambert, one of the lucky attendees, for the heads-up.
The Nature of the (Law) Firm
| Peter Klein |
Gordon Smith shared an interesting report on a recent Georgetown conference, “The Future of the Global Law Firm.” Apparently there is a healthy literature in legal scholarship examining the boundaries and internal organization of law firms. Writes Gordon:
The participants seem to have reached a few points of consensus. First, the legal profession has changed dramatically in the past two decades and it remains under significant stress, meaning that more change is on the way. Second, the rules that constrain change (e.g., prohibition of non-lawyer ownership, rules relating to conflicts, non-competition rules) should be changed sooner rather than later. Third, the traditional legal form (partnership) is largely irrelevant to the current practice of law, even if law firms want to create an organizational structure that encourages the collegiality of a traditional partnership. Fourth, the law firms that will succeed in the future are those that get the organizational structure right.
In a follow-up email, Gordon explains that the organizational features being challenged include the partnership model, the up-or-out “Cravath system,” and the outsourcing of routine services (e.g., electronic discovery) to places like India. Gordon recommends Laura Empson’s Managing the Modern Law Firm for an overview of the issues. I said I thought there was some work by economists and management scholars on the economic organization of the law firm (and professional services firms more generally), but couldn’t come up with much, aside from a series of interesting papers by Luis Garicano and Thomas Hubbard (here, here, and here). Any suggestions from our readers? Is the persistence of the partnership form, for example, mainly the result of arcane professional-ethics rules or is there an underlying efficiency rationale? If consulting firms can have IPOs, why not law firms?
New Essays on Insider Trading
| Peter Klein |
Steve Bainbridge reviews the history of insider-trading litigation and characterizes Henry Manne’s classic contribution.
Here are Manne’s own reflections (in 2005) on the influence of his work from the 1960s. The new paper, “Insider Trading: Hayek, Virtual Markets, and the Dog that Did Not Bark,” suggests that the activities of insider traders, in so far as they help move stock prices toward their “true” (full-information) values, provides valuable information to corporate decision-makers facing the Hayekian knowledge problem.
The Make-or-Buy Decision: Corporate Lawyer Edition
| Peter Klein |
What are our Lawyers made of?
What are our Lawyers made of?
Of Causes and fees, demurrers and pleas,
Learned Brother and lots of pother,
Counsel and jury with very wise looks,
Flaw in the indictment and statue books,
Such are our Lawyers made of,
Such are our Lawyers made of.
That’s one answer. It ain’t sugar and spice and everything nice, that’s for sure. Whatever lawyers are made of, should firms make them in-house, or hire ones made by somebody else? Steven Schwarcz addresses this question in a new paper, “To Make or to Buy: In-House Lawyering and Value Creation” (Journal of Corporation Law, Winter 2008). Schwarcz notes that large firms have been shifting much of their transactional work from outside law firms to in-house lawyers. Analysis of survey data suggests that information costs and scale and scope economies are the most important drivers of this trend. Asset specificity seems to play a less important role, mainly because reputation effects are sufficient to mitigate opportunistic behavior by outside law firms. A very interesting paper on the make-or-buy decision.
Economics and the Rule of Law
| Peter Klein |
This week’s Economist features a summary of recent economic controversies about the rule of law (thanks to Fabio Chaddad for the pointer). There is near-universal consensus among specialists in economic history and economic growth that the legal rules — and institutions more generally — “matter,” though the precise mechanisms are in dispute, and aspects of the institutional environment such as the quality of legal rules are difficult to measure consistently across societies and over time. We’ve touched on the closely related “legal origins” debate before. As with that controversy, the arguments in this one have become more subtle and complex in the last decade. As the Economist notes:
[A]s an economic concept the rule of law has had a turbulent history. It emerged almost abruptly during the 1990s from the dual collapses of Asian currencies and former Soviet economies. For a short time, it seemed to provide the answer to problems of development from Azerbaijan to Zimbabwe, until some well-directed criticism dimmed its star. Since then it has re-established itself as a central concept in understanding how countries grow rich — but not as the panacea it once looked like.
The Economist piece focuses on the distinction between “thick” and “thin” understandings of the rule of law. (more…)
Upcoming Events: A Busy June
| Peter Klein |
June is an exciting month for O&Mers looking for research conferences. First up is ACAC 2008, 12-14 June in Atlanta. ACAC, which has received high marks on this blog, is an annual workshop organized by Rich Makadok emphasizing the “big issues” in strategic management. Next is the DRUID 25th Anniversary Conference, 17-20 June in Copenhagen, with the theme of “Entrepreneurship and Innovation.” The distinguished participant list includes Rajshree Agarwal, Carliss Baldwin, Bo Carlsson, Kathy Eisenhardt, Maryann Feldman, Bronwyn Hall, Steve Klepper, Anita McGahan, Joanne Oxley, Olav Sorenson, Scott Stern, Sid Winter, and some Foss guy. Immediately afterward is ISNIE’s 12th annual meeting, 20-21 June, in Toronto. I am on the program committee, working with president-elect Scott Masten, and we got a bunch of great submissions this year. Barry Weingast and Robert Ellickson are keynoters. The preliminary program should be up on the ISNIE website soon.
Also, for graduate students in economics, history, philosophy, political science, business administration, and related disciplines there’s the Rothbard Graduate Seminar, 13-18 June in Auburn, Alabama. The RGS is an intensive workshop and research seminar on Austrian economics that uses Murray Rothbard’s Man, Economy, and State as its core text. I am one of the discussion leaders.
If I could teleport I’d attend all four!
Steven Cheung Has a Blog
| Peter Klein |
Unfortunately it’s in Chinese. Perhaps one of our Chinese-speaking readers could summarize its contents?
Here is an English-language blog dedicated to Cheung’s ideas. Here is his wikipedia entry, which includes some information on the Late Unpleasantness. And of course the economic analysis of property rights, to which Cheung is a major contributor, is a popular topic on this blog.
Still More on Legal Origins
| Peter Klein |
John Armour, Simon Deakin, Prabirjit Sarkar, Mathias Siems, and Ajit Singh add to the debate with a new dataset and a new interpretation: common-law countries offer better shareholder protection not because of the characteristics of common law per se, but because the emergence of a global common-law standard gave common-law countries a head start, a sort of network effect. Here is the paper. Abstract:
We test the ‘law matters’ and ‘legal origin’ claims using a newly created panel dataset measuring legal change over time in a sample of developed and developing countries. Our dataset improves on previous ones by avoiding country-specific variables in favour of functional and generic descriptors, by taking into account a wider range of legal data, and by considering the effects of weighting variables in different ways, thereby ensuring greater consistency of coding. Our analysis shows that legal origin explains part of the pattern of change in the adoption of shareholder protection measures over the period from the mid-1990s to the present day: in both developed and developing countries, common law systems were more protective of shareholder interests than civil law ones. We explain this result on the basis of the head start common law systems had in adjusting to an emerging ‘global’ standard based mainly on Anglo-American practice. Our analysis also shows, however, that civil law origin was not much of an obstacle to convergence around this model, since civilian systems were catching up with their counterparts in the common law. We then investigate whether there was a link in this period between increased shareholder protection and stock market development, using a number of measures such as stock market capitalisation, the value of stock-trading and the number of listed firms, after controlling for legal origin, the state of economic development of particular countries, and their position on the World Bank rule of law index. We find no evidence of a long-run impact of legal change on stock market development. This finding is incompatible with the claim that legal origin affects the efficiency of legal rules and ultimately economic development. Possible explanations for our result are that laws have been overly protective of shareholders; transplanted laws have not worked as expected; and, more generally, the exogenous legal origin effect is not as strong as widely supposed.
Henry Manne, Academic Entrepreneur
| Peter Klein |
Henry Manne did as much as anyone to create the modern discipline of law and economics. I refer here not only to his scholarly contributions, particularly his work on the market for corporate control and on insider trading, but also his creation of institutions (such as the original Law and Economics Center at the University of Miami) to support the emerging field. So it’s nice to see this essay by Larry Ribstein, “Henry Manne: Intellectual Entrepreneur,” coming out in Pioneers of Law and Economics edited by LLoyd Cohen and Josh Wright. (Via Josh.)
Writing when there was a theory vacuum in legal academia, Manne breathed life into corporate law by using economic principles to formulate a sweeping new theory of the corporation. Then he took his show on the road with seminars, programs and ultimately a law school to create a market for his ideas. The Chapter shows that Manne was an entrepreneur not only in bringing people and ideas together, but also in the Schumpeterian sense Manne discussed in his work on insider trading — an active participant in the creative destruction of the existing paradigm rather than merely a manager of existing ideas. Manne’s career demonstrates that, under the right conditions, a single scholar can leave noticeable ripples in the stream of intellectual history. By demonstrating that corporations, and by inference other important institutions, are best analyzed in market terms, and by creating an intellectual market for these and other economic ideas, Manne changed the way scholars, judges, regulators and others think about the role of law in society.
See also this Manne essay on the emergence of the field. And these papers by my former student Alex Padilla on insider trading. (And these cool gowns worn by the examiners at Alex’s dissertation defense at l’Université d’Aix en Provence.)
Organizations and Markets 
Recent Comments