A note concerning the proposed emasculation of the legal services corporation

In its frenzy to dismantle the New Deal and Great Society programs of past progressive administrations, the Reagan administration has taken a special interest in the emasculation of the Legal Services Corporation. This should come as no great surprise.Then Governor Reagan and thethen Legal Services Program became immediate adversaries at the time of the program's inception. The purpose in this paper is to examine the pending emasculation of this instrumentality of legal reform in the context of structural changes elsewhere in the American legal profession.     

A note on the neutrality of the cash flow corporation tax

The cash flow tax has been widely recommended as a form of taxing corporate income which is neutral with respect to investment decisions. This note points out that the claim is valid only under the assumption that the tax rate is constant over time. By contrast, an ‘ideal’ profits tax is neutral whatever the time shape of the tax rate.     

A note concerning a credit rule for monetary policy

A technique introduced by Friedman is used to analyze the ability of the Federal Reserve to control the money supply. We find that the necessary conditions for control are so restrictive that a constant growth rate for the money stock may not be achievable. We suggest, therefore, a steady growth rate for Federal Reserve Credit.     

Market and regulatory forces in the pricing of legal services

New data on individual law firms and attorneys is used to examine the effects of professional licensing restrictions and market forces on prices of legal services. The data allow detailed testing of the hypothesis that licensing restrictions serve to increase the price of professional services as well as the incomes of those providing these services. In general, little support is found for this hypothesis. Instead, the estimates show that market forces are most important in explaining variations in prices and attorney incomes.Dean Lueck is on leave from Louisiana State University. We thank William Boiger, Executive Director of the National Resource Center for Consumers of Legal Services, for providing data on law firms. Andrew Dick, Philip Hersch, Andy Kleit, Bill Kovacic, Fred McChesney, Jeff Moore, and two anonymous referees provided helpful comments on earlier versions. Chris Diener, Jim Larkins, Robert Pace, and Darrin Timothy provided research assistance.     

A theory of legal presumptions

This article analyzes how legal presumptions can mediate betweencostly litigation and ex ante incentives. We augment a moralhazard model with a redistributional litigation game in whicha presumption parameterizes how a court 'weighs' evidence offeredby the opposing sides. Strong prodefendant presumptions forecloselawsuits altogether, but also engender shirking. Strong proplaintiffpresumptions have the opposite effects. Moderate presumptionsgive rise to equilibria in which both shirking and suit occurprobabilisitically. The socially optimal presumption tradesoff agency costs against litigation costs, and could be eitherstrong or moderate, depending on the social importance of effort,the costs of filing suit, and the comparative advantage thatdiligent agents have over their shirking counterparts in mountinga defense. We posit three applications of our model: the litigationrate effects of the 1995 Private Securities Litigation ReformAct, the business judgment rule in corporations law, and fiduciaryduties in financially distressed firms.     

A qualification concerning the efficiency of tax expenditures

This paper examines a problem in a welfare loss model of tax expenditures. This problem forces us to reconsider the normative efficiency argument for tax expenditures. A reformulation highlights an implicit assumption of improper government allocation contained in the original model. The reformulation suggests that subsidization is an inappropriate marginal policy tool in the charity context.     

公司治理的核心--企业控制权配置的基础、问题和规范

企业控制权配置是公司治理的核心和关键。企业控制权配置的制度安排取决于其基础;而企业控制权配置状态又内生出各自不同的问题,使得企业控制权配置不能达到最优企业控制权安排;为了达到最优企业控制权安排,从规范的角度分析,就必须按照资源对企业的贡献程度来对企业控制权进行配置。     

A note on the factor-price frontier

Conclusions For an economist the possibility of an upward sloping factorprice frontier is extremely surprising. It has been shown that although such a factor-price frontier is theoretically possible, it is not very likely that it can occur under given economic and technical conditions since it would imply that capitalists are a class of borrowers (from nature) whereas we can be fairly sure that they are a class of lenders.I am indebted to Prof. E. Streissler for helpful comments.     

A general equilibrium model of the incidence of corporation income tax under uncertainty

In this paper we investigate the incidence of the corporation income tax in terms of a two-sector, general equilibrium model, where production decisions are made under uncertainty. The conventional result, derived originally by Harberger (1962), is that if the corporate sector is the capital-intensive sector, then capital must bear a greater burden of the tax, in proportion to its initial share in national income, than labor. This result continues to hold unambiguously under uncertainty only if the relative and the absolute risk aversion of the corporations are non- increasing in profits. Otherwise, the Harberger result may not hold.     

A note on the monotonicity of Vn

We give an example of a repeated game with incomplete information, lack of information on one side, and non-standard information, in which the value V₃, of the three-fold repeated game, is greater than V₂.     

A note on the allocation of time

A multi-commodity model in which time as well as nominal income is necessary in the process of consumption is analyzed. Duality theory is used to provide a counter example to the ‘Linder Theorem’ that a rise in real wages will decrease consumption of some good if it is more time intensive than the weighted average of the time intensity of all other commodities.     

A note on the duty of disclosure

This letter studies the possibility of voluntary breach of contract in the presence of new information. If the information had to be disclosed prior to the agreement, it is shown by example that all individuals may be worse off than if the act of disclosure is itself voluntary.     

A note on the diffusion of innovation

The paper deals with the process of substitution between technologies in a framework of increasing returns to scale. The approach stresses the interaction between capacity expansion and market demand as explanations of the diffusion of technologies into their niches. The demand and supply sides of the diffusion process are therefore brought together to determine simultaneously patterns of output and prices.It analyzes the dynamics of the substitution path, where a logistic diffusion process for the new technology is assumed, and determines the substitution curve between the old technology and the new one.     

A note on the pricing of IPOs

This paper studies the pricing of IPOs in a tractable model in which an investment bank faces some investors with superior information. We show how this can lead to underpricing and we make a number of empirical predictions.     

乡镇企业中的社会资本分析

文章从形成方式和确定性成都出发，将社会资本分为柔性和刚性两个层次，分析了乡镇企业发展中柔性社会资本的地位、作用，及其局限；提出刚性社会资本的引入使乡镇企业再续发展的保障的观点。