The John M. Olin Program in Law and Economics

Income inequality is a national preoccupation, and the public’s imagination is captured by the astronomical incomes of Valley tech billionaires and...

The global economy owes more than $100 trillion in reparations for slavery, but states have persistently deferred payment. Meanwhile, the OECD’s...

Psychology and law, by their nature, are deeply entwined. Both are about human behavior – understanding it, modifying it, regulating it. Psychology’s...

Extraordinary times beget extraordinary measures. Multiple national emergencies during the past quarter century have generated a pitched debate as to...

Noncarceral conviction is a common outcome of criminal court cases: for every individual incarcerated, there are approximately three who were recently...

There is a live debate going on over whether antitrust should take a broader view of the economics of market concentration. When antitrust reformers...

The closing auction is an increasingly important trade mechanism due to the rise of passive funds that require closing price execution. We study...

Puerto Rico. Detroit. Stockton. Arkansas. Each of these places stands as a testament to the import of municipal debt crises and their capacity to...

There is concern that present-biased agents incur too much debt because of its deferred costs – concern that has influenced regulation of consumer...

The history of public policy is littered with failures to solve large-scale social problems using interventions derived from behavioral science...

The Supreme Court has twice held since 2020 that statutory restrictions on the President’s removal power violate Article II of the U.S. Constitution...

Memory issues stemming from criminal trials that involve the reliability of eyewitnesses are well-known. However, the relevance of memory to law...

Large language models (LLMs) now perform extremely well on many natural language processing tasks. Their ability to convert legal texts to data may...

Today's mass torts are headed to bankruptcy. Be it Purdue Pharma's opioids, United States of America (USA) Gymnastics' sexual abuse, Pacific Gas and...

Countries hit by unexpected crises often look to their overseas diasporas for assistance. Some countries have tapped into this generosity of their...

Evidence law controls what information will be admissible in court and when, how, and by whom it may be presented. It shapes not only the trial...

We evaluate the impacts of adopting algorithmic risk assessments in sentencing. We find that judges changed sentencing practices in response to the...

This chapter studies political corruption and its many relationships to the law of democracy. It begins with bribery laws, which forbid officials from...

Lenders are perfectly free to decide for themselves whether, when, how, to whom and on what terms they will extend credit to a sovereign borrower. But...

False information causes harm, threatening individuals, groups, and society. Many people struggle to judge the veracity of the information around them...

Many analyses of law take an unsentimental, perhaps even cynical view of regulated actors. On this view, law is a necessity borne of people’s selfish...

This article examines the impact of Greece retroactively, via legislation, changing the terms in hundreds of billions of euros worth of Greek...

The SEC mandates that public companies assess new information that changes the risks that they face and disclose these if there has been a “material”...

This paper describes the response of George Washington's administration to a plea for emergency war financing from French colonists who were trying to...

The conventional view is that standardized boilerplate terms represent an optimal contractual solution to the contracting problems facing parties in...

Consequential damages have been a cornerstone of contract doctrine since the broken crankshaft in Hadley v. Baxendale. And the Hadley rule is one of...

Even before the pandemic, the 90,000 local governments in the United States faced grim fiscal positions. During the pandemic, revenues cratered, costs...

In this article, we examine the relations between risk, the choice of foreign or local contract terms (parameters), and maturity in the sovereign debt...