On and Off the Liability Bandwagon: Explaining State Adoptions of Strict Liability in Hazardous Waste Programs

We test a model of states' adoption of the hazardous waste liability regime (negligence, strict liability) providing greater net benefits. The likelihood of adopting strict liability increases in a state's number of chemical-intensive manufacturing plants, decreases in the number of large mining establishments. Also predictive: severity of state's hazardous waste problem, effectiveness of other state environmental programs, and political climate. States may view strict liability as better for industrial than mining pollution, and may be partly motivated by "precaution targeting" and "deep pockets" mentality. Non-adopters may wish not to discourage business or have other programs that substitute for strict liability.     

Environmental Liability Law and Induced Technical Change – The Role of Discounting

We analyse the incentives of environmental liability law for inducing progress to emission abatement technology. We consider three liability rules: strict liability, a negligence rule with an emission norm as the due care standard, and a double negligence rule which combines the emission standard with an abatement technology norm. In the case of distortive discounting, i.e. where the private discount rate deviates from the social one, we show, how the level of distortion influences the ranking of liability rules, according to the criterion of generated social cost.     

Generalized Progress of Abatement Technology: Incentives Under Environmental Liability Law

This paper considers the incentives environmental liability creates to improve pollution abatement technology. Our analysis considers technical progress in end-of-pipe abatement and in the production technology used, thereby generalizing the approach taken by Endres et?al. (Environ Resour Econ 36:341?C366, 2007). We establish that this generalization has drastic repercussions on incentives under negligence liability, while the performance of strict liability is not compromised. Furthermore, it is demonstrated that the social desirability of investment in abatement or production technology (or both) decisively determines how ex-ante and ex-post regulation fare with respect to welfare maximization in the case of negligence liability.     

Led on the Wrong Track? A Note on the Direction of Technical Change under Environmental Liability Law

This note shows that polluters might opt for technical change which is inferior to other innovations from a social standpoint under environmental liability law. Polluters choose what is socially optimal under strict liability. However, we show that it is possible to have not only too little or too much technical change of a given kind but, importantly, also the wrong kind of technical change under negligence.     

A Complete Characterization of Efficient Liability Rules: Comment

In a recent article, Jain and Singh (2002) prove that a condition they call negligence liability is necessary and sufficient for any liability rule to be efficient. In this note I criticize their result on two accounts: First, their result crucially depends on implicit restrictions they impose on the liability assignment function. If we drop the assumption that the liability apportionment between two non-negligent parties is constant for all combinations of non-negligent care levels, the equivalence between the condition of negligence liability and the efficiency of liability rules breaks down. Second, their attempt to drop the assumption of uniqueness for the social optimum improves the generality of the model at a substantial cost, since it must be accompanied by a new assumption that is possibly even more unrealistic. The importance of the uniqueness assumption is shown in a simple discrete care model, in which comparative negligence may lead to an inefficient outcome when the existence of two social optima leads us to interpret due care as a varying standard based on the other partys actual choice.     

Delay and Settlement in Litigation

Delay in litigation is a policy concern in many jurisdictions. Little evidence is available on the causes of such delay, however. We present a version of Spier's (1992) bargaining model of litigation and derive directly a functional form for the conditional probability of case settlement. We then estimate this and test predictions about the effects of legal costs and uncertainty over damages and liability on the conditional probability of settlement, using data from negligence claims against several NHS Trusts. Our results provide a direct test of the model and shed light on the causes of settlement delay in England.     

Ambiguity and Accident Law

Environmental accidents often involve ambiguous risks, i.e., the relevant probabilities are unknown. This paper studies how liability rules are affected by ambiguity. The injurer and the victim choose a level of care, which is observable, and an unobservable action. Both actions may affect the size and/or likelihood of loss. We analyze the welfare implications of tort rules. First, we show that with ambiguity, negligence is likely to perform better than strict liability. Second, we propose a tort rule of negligence and punitive damages, which gives the efficient levels of both care and unobserved actions.     

Resource Management and the Mayor's Guarantee in French Water Allocation

This paper uses standard methods in stochastic calculus tomeasure the cost of the agency conflict that pits electedofficials of French municipalities against the communities theyrepresent in the management of the water supply. Under the Frenchlegal code, the municipalities are responsible for the watersupply and the elected officials are personally liable for anydamage due to negligence on their part. Uncertainty regardingexactly how negligence will be defined by the courts puts theelected officials in a precarious position. By delegatingauthority to an oligopoly of private firms, however, electedofficials can eliminate their personal liability, which istransferred to the delegated firm. Many studies argue thatdelegation locks communities into long-term contracts that areagainst their better interests. Thus, the agency conflict mayaffect the delegation decision to the detriment of the community.To determine whether or not this is true it is necessary to knowthe economic cost of the mayor's personal liability.     

Profit‐maximizing behaviour replaces social sanctions in urban microcredit marketsThe case of Italian MAGs1

Poor local information networks and weak social sanctions in urban settings make joint liability unable to guarantee high repayment rates to microlenders. Yet, microcredit programmes in Western Europe report good performance even if the majority of them require no collateral. We collected data from three Italian microcredit institutions which operate in urban areas, granting individual loans without collateral to single entrepreneurs and teams (associations and cooperatives). We found that teams repay with higher probability. On this basis we developed a microlending instrument which, like joint liability implemented in rural economies, mitigates informational problems but, unlike joint liability, fits the urban context in that it reproduces a cohesion among entrepreneurs based on profit‐maximizing behaviour and not on social capital.     

The progressivity of equalization payments in federations

We investigate the conditions under which an inequality averse and additively separable welfarist central government would choose to set up a progressive equalization payments scheme in a federation with local public goods. A progressive equalization payments scheme is a list of per capita net (possibly negative) subsidies – one such net subsidy for every jurisdiction – that are decreasing with respect to jurisdictions per capita wealth. We examine this question in a setting where the case for progressivity is a priori the strongest, namely: all citizens have the same utility function, inhabitants of a given jurisdiction have the same wealth and are not able to move across jurisdictions and there is no cross-jurisdiction competition in the setting of tax rates. We show that the central government favors a progressive equalization payments scheme for all distributions of wealth and population sizes if and only if its objective function is additively separable between each jurisdiction's per capita wealth and number of inhabitants. When interpreted for a mean of order r social welfare function, and assuming the absence of congestion in the local public good, this condition is shown to be equivalent to the requirement that the individual indirect utility function be additively separable between wealth public good price and be raised at the power 1/r before its agregation by means of the mean-of-order r social welfare function. Some implications of this restriction to the case where the individual's direct utility function is additively separable are also derived.     

Why is there Corporate Taxation? The Role of Limited Liability Revisited

Most economists reject the idea that corporate taxation should be interpreted as a price for the privilege of limited liability. In this paper, we reconsider this idea and show that limited liability can lead to overinvestment if information is incomplete. In this setting, introducing an additional tax on limited liability contracts is welfare-enhancing. Our model thus offers an explanation for the nexus between double taxation and limited liability observed in many existing tax systems.      

An Economic Analysis of Australian Damage Remedies for Misleading Prospectuses: Trade Practices Act versus Corporations Law

Laws that address damages caused by deceptive or misleading prospectuses impact on the incentive issuers face to create such prospectuses, and hence impact on the level of investment. In Australia, it has been proposed to shift from a strict liability regime under s. 52 of the Trade Practices Act to a due diligence regime under the Corporations Law. I argue that due diligence is inferior to strict liability for large firms, but in some cases may be preferred to strict liability for small firms. I conclude that due diligence—as a liability rule—increases the cost and complexity of legal action, rather than being a 'corporate law simplification' as intended by the Corporations Law Simplification Task Force. Compared to strict liability, it is more likely to result in greater demand for the services of lawyers and accountants than it is to improve the accuracy of reporting.     

Large‐Scale Risks and Technological Change: What About Limited Liability?

We consider a firm under strict liability that must choose between two risky technologies, one being safer but costlier than the other one. The total potential level of damage increases with the level of activity. We show that, under limited liability, technological change is welfare‐improving and leads to full risk internalization when the firms are sufficiently capitalized. Nevertheless, the percentage of firms adopting the safer technology and full risk internalization is higher under unlimited liability than under limited liability. We show how an adequate tax policy increases this percentage. We also determine the characteristics of a second‐best tax policy.     

Group-lending: Sequential financing,lender monitoring and joint liability

We develop a simple model of group-lending based on peer monitoring and moral hazard. We find that, in the absence of sequential financing or lender monitoring, group-lending schemes may involve under-monitoring with the borrowers investing in undesirable projects. Moreover, under certain parameter configurations, group-lending schemes involving either sequential financing, or a combination of lender monitoring and joint liability are feasible. In fact, group-lending schemes with sequential financing may succeed even in the absence of joint liability, though the repayment rate will be lower. In the absence of joint liability, however, group-lending with lender monitoring is unlikely to be feasible.     

On the efficiency of the negligence rule

The three versions of the negligence rule discussed in the literature differ regarding whether a negligent injurer is liable for the entire loss or only for the incremental loss; or regarding whether negligence is defined as failure to take at least due care or failure to take a cost‐justified precaution. It is shown in the paper that the incremental version with untaken precaution notion of negligence is not efficient; not even for the unilateral case. The paper also establishes, for the bilateral case, the efficiency of the incremental version with the shortfall‐from‐due‐care way of defining negligence.     

Sharing the cost of redundant items

We ask how to share the cost of finitely many public goods (items) among users with different needs: some smaller subsets of items are enough to serve the needs of each user, yet the cost of all items must be covered, even if this entails inefficiently paying for redundant items. Typical examples are network connectivity problems when an existing (possibly inefficient) network must be maintained.We axiomatize a family cost ratios based on simple liability indices, one for each agent and for each item, measuring the relative worth of this item across agents, and generating cost allocation rules additive in costs.     

Forcing Firms to Think About the Future: Economic Incentives and the Fate of Hazardous Waste

What is the cost of off-site hazardous waste disposal? In addition to paying for disposal fees and shipments costs, generators of hazardous waste can potentially be held liable for the cost of cleanup if the waste disposal site contaminates the environment after closure or abandonment and thus falls under the federal or state Superfund legislation. This paper empirically examines the sensitivity of individual hazardous waste generators to these categories of costs, exploiting the variation across states in factors influencing disposal costs, and in the structure of the liability imposed on waste generators under certain circumstances by state laws. We fit nested logit models to predict the waste management method (incineration or landfill disposal) and the state of destination for shipments of halogenated solvent waste used for metal cleaning in manufacturing and reported in the Toxic Release Inventory in 1988–1990. Waste generators respond to transportation costs and to proxies for current disposal costs. Generators also find the concurrent presence of strict and joint-and-several liability a deterrent, but this deterrent effect does not vary with the wealth of the firm or the volume of the waste shipped.     

Regulation and altruism

We study optimal contracts in a regulator–agent setting with joint production, altruistic and selfish agents, limited liability, and uneasy outcome measurement. Such a setting represents sectors of activities such as education and healthcare provision. The agents and the regulator jointly produce an outcome for which they all care to some extent that is varying from agent to agent. Some agents, the altruistic ones, care more than the regulator does while others, the selfish agents, care less. Moral hazard is present due to both the agent's effort and the joint outcome that are not contractible. Adverse selection is present too since the regulator cannot a priori distinguish between altruistic and selfish agents. Contracts consist of a simple transfer from the regulator to the agents together with the regulator's input in the joint production. We show that, under the conditions of our setting and when we face both moral hazard and adverse selection, the regulator maximizes welfare with a menu of contracts, which specify higher transfers for the altruistic agents and higher regulator's inputs for the selfish agents.     

Non-parametric and semi-parametric asset pricing

We find that the CAPM fails to explain the small firm effect even if its non-parametric form is used which allows time-varying risk and non-linearity in the pricing function. Furthermore, the linearity of the CAPM can be rejected, thus the widely used risk and performance measures, the beta and the alpha, are biased and inconsistent. We deduce semi-parametric measures which are non-constant under extreme market conditions in a single factor setting; on the other hand, they are not significantly different from the linear estimates of the Fama-French three-factor model. If we extend the single factor model with the Fama-French factors, the simple linear model is able to explain the US stock returns correctly.     

Product Liability: Beyond Class Action

Can punitive product liability enhance economic efficiency? A very simple economic theory, assuming that the probability and the degree of product dissatisfaction are functions only of the producer's not of the consumer's effort, is modelled and analysed in this paper. The qualitative conclusion hinges critically upon whether the legal liability is reflected on price determination. If the price of the product is insensitive to product liability legislation, then punitive liability beyond the class action (i.e., compensatory payments more than proportional representation of potentially dissatisfied consumers) can induce socially desirable levels of effort exerted by the producer firm. This affirmative effect disappears if the price fully reflects all the expected legal liabilities, whereby punitive liability tends to reduce economic efficiency by encouraging costly lawsuit.